So, you may have noticed either the site being down for a little while today for maintenance and/or a brand new look to your author dashboard. They both portend to some cool new things afoot at MindBites.  Specifically, we’re excited to be rolling out several new key additions to our author publishing platform in a beta release.  So what’s new?

1. New and Improved Author Dashboard - Now, we have a much more robust and flexible author dashboard. It includes a completely revised dashboard view, a new Analyze Activity section with some much deeper analytics, a Manage Content section to, well, manage your content more easily, and easy access to all of the the new tools we’ve been rolling out from a bulk uploader to a widget configurator and a custom store creator.  You told us you needed something more flexible, and we think this is a strong step in that direction.

2. Dynamic Video Storefronts and Widgets - One area of functionality that has been in a controlled release up until now is the ability to create custom video storefronts as well as dynamic widgets featuring your content.  Custom storefronts are simple private label video stores that you can configure to match your existing site, and thus, easily have a video store on your own site. Several authors have already done this and have been very successful. Widgets showcase small catalogs of your content and can be embedded in your blog or anywhere across the web.  To check out both custom storefronts and widgets, go to the Design Storefronts area in your Author Dashboard.

3. Expanded Capabilities and Premium Platform Levels - We’ve also been listening to your many requests for different features.  From needing additional private stores, to the ability to feature some lessons for free, make content stream-only or price even more flexibly, every author or organization we work with has a slightly different set of needs to maximize their opportunity with their online content.  To that end, we are now structuring our author platform into different subscription levels.  It will still be free for someone to sign up and sell some lessons via MindBites, but now we can offer a range of higher value capabilities to those of you who really need and want them. 

So what does this mean for you?
Existing Authors - For all you existing authors, don’t worry.  We value your loyalty and efforts in helping us to build MindBites, and we’ll be grandfathering you into your current usage level through most of 2010 (look for an email with details).  Thanks for your continued support, and please keep it coming.

New Authors - We’re excited to have you here, and now, more than ever, we have a range of tools you can use to help you build out your online video content monetization efforts.  Take a look around and upgrade now to lock-in these introductory rates for our premium platform levels. 

Roll-out and Expected Wrinkles
Expect a few hiccups and strange things in your data over the next week or so. We changed quite a bit both on the exterior and under the hood. For one, right now you will have only about a week’s worth of data on your content.  This will be built out to all of your history over the next few days.  We also have very little front-end details on the different platform levels, capabilities etc.  Look for more of this to be rolled out over the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, please take it all for a spin, and let us know what you think and what you’d like to see us add as we continue to build out our platform levels.  As always, thanks for your support.

Hi,
I like the new look and feel of the pages. Especially the series feature is very useful for my video tutorials.

What’s still missing in my opinion: I can see how many page impressions I’ve got for all or for individual videos. I can also see the number of sales for all or individual, but I cannot get a list of individual sales. So if I see that somebody bought my video lately, I have to scan through all individual movies to see which one it was.

A list of recent sales would be very useful.

Marian

Great point Marian. We’ll look at adding a specific sales page.  Thanks for the feedback.

Sorry, I liked it better before because I could tell how many people have looked at my pages.  Now I can’t figure it out.  Or the monthly thing, I want to know TOTAL not monthly.
Thanks,

A couple of things:
1. I miss seeing how much was donated to charity.
2. It would be nice to somehow get notified when someone comments on a video. I’ve had people comment on a video but they are really asking a question in it and I don’t see if for months because I don’t have time to check each video’s comment.
3. A tutorial of the new dashboard would be nice, it’s a little overwhelming to see such a huge change (I know change is good but I hate change LOL!)

I appreciate all the hard work that all the MindBites staff have been putting in to make this website a success. You all clearly have a great vision that you are making come true.  I love the support we get from all of you. I’m glad to be one of the first few authors at MindBites!!
:-)
Laura

Hi Polly,

You should still be able to see the total page views for your lessons fairly easily.

When you go to your dashboard, pageviews will be shown by default in the chart and the actual number will be in the grey summary bar just below the chart.

You are correct though, that we made the default time period to be the last 30 days.  We figured this would be most useful for authors checking back often to see (if the majority of authors would rather see all of time as the default though, we can certainly do that).

That being said, there’s an easy way to see pageviews for all of your lessons for all of time.  Simply go to the “From:” date bx above the chart, click behind the 9 in 2009 and change it to 7 (or anything lower), and then all of the summary numbers including pageviews will be for all of time.

Here’s a screenshot of what I’m referring to:
http://img.skitch.com/20091105-1danqftnbigusy445s2p3r2kra.jpg

Hi Laura,

Great thoughts and thanks for the kind words!

In terms of comments, yeah good idea.  We actually plan to do two things: 1. We’ll put a Ratings tab under the Analyze Activity area which would just list out Reviews and Comments recently made on any of your lessons. 2. We plan to give you as an author an option to be emailed whenever anyone comments or reviews on of your lessons.

As for charity contributions, unfortunately designating a portion of your proceeds to go to charity has never been adopted by very many authors.  As a result, we had to make the choice to design the new interface without that being a major component.  That being said, we plan to continue to support those of you who do donate a portion of proceeds to charity, and if there’s interest we’ll bring it back more fully into the author fold.

Great idea on the screencast.  We’ll put something together and get it out to you guys.

Thanks for the feedback!

I appreciate all the hard work that all the MindBites staff have been putting in to make this website a success. You all clearly have a great vision. I look forward to you updates and new releases. This is really a great website.

regards,
rochelle