Sto
ck contributor assistant tool Stock Performer has added new features to their service. First they included a function to measure your Ranking and Performance in stock industry against all other contributors, and now they've introduced a new system to calculate Collection Cost, Profit and Loss.
These functions add business analysis power to the already advanced service to track your sales in stock industry. Collecting anonymized data from users, the new Ranking and Performance function lets you know where you're standing in business compared to your competition.
And the new Collection Costs, Profits and Loss feature provides you with a way to know how your different productions performed for you. Enabling you to enter your productions' costs, the system automatically checks it against your revenue to show your profit or loss, updating in real time and letting you know exactly how much you've earned, when you've broken even and when you start making profit.
Ranking and Performance
This function tells you how much you're earning, how many files you've sold, and how many assets you've added to your accounts, compared to everybody else in the industry, letting you know exactly how many are making more, and how many are making less than you.
It uses data collected from Stock Performer users who accepted to take part in the sample. And only users who opted with their data are allowed to access the Ranking and Performance feature.
While Stock Performer doesn't intend to disclose participation numbers periodically, they informed at this time that the results are based on 25 million uploads and 65 million sales across 11 agencies, to give a clear idea of how broad and inclusive the sample is.
The information collected is completely anonymized, and further used to offer you a comparative analysis that shows you how well (or not) you are doing in the market. The tool updates the results as new data comes in, so you get the most recent results possible every time you refresh your browser.
The stats are broken down by Revenue, Downloads and Uploads. For each of these parameters you'll see a ranking bar, that goes from “Bottom of the Market” (the lowest earner of all users included) to “Top of the Market” (the highest earner), showing a percentage that represents your position between these two extremes.
The Ranking and Performance is also detailed for time periods: in your daily stats you will see the Ranking and Performance corresponding to one day – including the current day -, in monthly stats you will see it applied to a particular month, and in the yearly stats you will see your position in the market for a given year.
One of the most valuable points in this function, though, is that you can also see your performance at just one agency –like iStock or Shutterstock, for example– besides your overall ranking across all marketplaces.
Like this, these statistics let you explore your performance on various parameters, to determine if your current business strategy is successful, or what areas need some fine-tuning or adjustments.
Collection Costs, Profit and Loss
The most recent addition to Stock Performer's service is within their already popular Collections tool, which lets you group and track revenue for determined assets. Now, the system also lets you to manually introduce the costs value for each collection (in USD), and track your profitability levels for each.
Using the cost amount entered, Stock Performer automatically calculates profit or loss for the collection, based in total revenues for the assets included in the collection. The numbers are recalculated as soon as new revenue is registered, keeping the results updated.
The latest feature is very useful, and has various applications. You can calculate the cost of a particular shoot and add it, and that way you'll know when you break even and when you start generating profit. This is valuable to determine whether certain kinds of productions are worthwhile or not, and to make adjustments for next shoots.
You can also use it to measure the success of someone you hired, by creating a collection with only the work that photographer or videographer did, including the total cost of the hiring, and see when revenue from that production covers the costs of creating it. Plus, using Collection's “Merge” functionality you can also know the state of profits or loss for a given year, to determine if that year's investments where fruitful or otherwise.
While working only with USD can add complexity for some users (if you work with a different currency, you'll need to calculate the exchange rate), this new feature adds great value to Stock Performer's service, as being able to track your costs and profitability is key to be deeply up to date in your business.
Give your Feedback and Help Improve the Service
Stock Performer told their customers the decision to include this feature was impulsed by the great response they received to the one-time, annual rankings report they issued via email to their users in the past 2 years.
They encourage customers to try the new permanent feature and to give feedback, since they intend to expand and improve its functionality over time.
In the same way, while the recently added Cost, Profit and Loss functionality intends to provide an overall valuable service, they are aware that different users have different workflows and measure their cost and profits differently. And they are open to suggestions about how to improve the function to cover more user needs.
If you don't have yet tried Stock Perfomer, then you're really missing out. This is a great assistance service to track your incomes from stock media industry and analyze them to get business insights that will help you improve your business strategy. Don't hesitate, sign up for Stock Performer now!
