Photographer stats 📈✨
Celebrating new milestone views on Unsplash with a new chart (and other new things)
Have you seen the new stats updates on your Unsplash profile yet?
If not, you should see it soon (Edit: as of this morning, February 19th, 2020, it’s currently rolled out to a subset of Unsplash accounts.)
Experiencing FOMO? Don’t! Those subscribed to the newsletters are already receiving most of the info that the new stats page shows:
The Monthly Stats email pretty much sums up everything we need to know about our performance on Unsplash: How many views, and downloads did I hit? Is that number good or bad? How does it compare to the rest of the Unsplash contributors?
The “You made it to the Unsplash Editorial feed” email notifies us when one of our photos makes it to the homepage.
And my personal favourite: The Milestone email that tells us when we hit yet another mind-blowing stat 🏆🔥📈.
But as you can see, I have this love-hate relationship with our stats emails.
On the one hand, it’s become an integral part of being a contributor to Unsplash. It’s something we expect and look forward to receiving. And it’s something we love to share a screenshot of on Twitter.
On the other hand, I always thought there was a better way we could celebrate photographers and stats in general. Our existing stats page worked fine, but it lacked the elements that made the newsletters special. We knew that, with a bit of work, we could get the stats page to be an exciting place for contributors to experience their achievements.
And so we did just that.
Here’s an overview of the features the team worked on these past few months.
Featured photos: Photos featured on the homepage adorn a golden icon. You can find out which date a photo was promoted by hovering over the icon. An extension of this project would be to expand the concept of “featured” to photos appearing in feeds other than the homepage (i.e., a topic, a curated collection, photo of the day, etc…)
Want to know how we promote photos? Read Annie’s article “How we choose what photos to feature on the Unsplash homepage.”
Updated charts: Hovering over a specific data point of the chart reveals the number of views or downloads accumulated for that particular date. You’ll notice that the graph now reflects your all-time stats on Unsplash — an improvement from showing only the last 30 days.
Top featured applications: Ever wonder where your million photo downloads end up on the web? With this update, we’re able to see how our photos impact the more than 1,700+ creative applications that utilize the Unsplash Library.
A future iteration of this would be to show what percentage of the apps make up your total amount of views/downloads. (E.g. 40% of your downloads come from Trello, 10% on Adobe Spark, 8% on PicsArt)
Everything we imagined for the stats page became possible thanks to the hard work and dedication of the API, web, and data teams. Here’s what they had to say about the project:
Bruno Aguirre: I’m stealing Roberta Doyle’s thunder because she already went to bed after a long day of work but this deserves to be shared: The initial production ready version of the new stats is now live. This is not only a huge project that she took charge but one of the most comprehensive collaborations between teams.
New technology was developed to be able to put this thing in motion. From huge optimizations from Timothy Carbone to create the first stream of realtime data that is consumed and stored by api to the fast paced work of Sami Jaber to have this ready for prime time. Many things the teams do tend to be invisible to the naked eye, this is not one of them and they all should be proud.
Aaron Klaassen: Seriously 🔥🔥🔥🔥 to everyone on this. Took building a ton of infrastructure that is going to keep paying dividends not just scaling for higher traffic but ever-fancier stats visualizations like this.
We’ve been saying “yep we’ll get there” to a stats system like this for years and I’m pretty hyped to see it in production.
When I started contributing to Unsplash, I never thought I’d get anywhere near the number of views and downloads I have today. Posting to Unsplash was never about reaching crazy milestones. I, just like a lot of contributors, wanted to give back to the community that has given me so much at a time when, as a student, then as a freelancer, I couldn’t afford stock photography.
I try to ignore the milestones I reach on Unsplash, but ever since working on the project, I’ve started to pay a bit more attention 😅. I sometimes lie to myself and others, pretending that I don’t really care about stats — that it’s not the driving force behind my Unsplash contributions.
It’s pretty cool to think that I’m one of the top 50 contributors on the platform. It puts things in perspective. And if people can continue to benefit from my work as I continue to reach for new milestones, then that’s not a bad thing at all.
If you want to find out more official information about stats, check out the Unsplash Help Center.
P.S. Regarding the Design blog. Sorry for the long hiatus — we’re just terrible at writing. I’ve known Kirill since we attended design school together, and neither of us has ever handed a school paper on time. I can’t promise that’ll ever change. But I do hope to add more to this blog more frequently. ✌️
