Hmm...
 
  I think that's not such a bad idea! I wouldn't mind seeing how I rank at GCU. It might definitely give some of the artists (including myself) a boost in the right direction. A little competition is always good!
 
  But it's totally up to the GCU staff. Either way, I'm already contented with just being part of the GCU family!
 
Oma.

If the top ten artists were to be determined by the highest number of sales per day, or by the most submissions per day, it would simply not reflect the "best artist."
An artist who spends many of the day's hours creating something of quality cannot compete for sales, promotion, or being prolific with people who post numerous repeat images of lesser quality.  I, for one, cannot find the time to even keep up with the issues in this forum, no less do the necessary promotion.  
Although it might be nice to see how an artist is standing in the field, I think it would be better to have a random highlight of a group of artists on a daily basis, showing their new images.  It might be good for the GCU staff to pick out daily favorites also.  We could also have a category showing the daily, or weekly favorites as voted on by other GCU artists.
Doing this exposes all members of GCU to new ideas and approaches.
This is an artist community, I hope at least.  We should not be in competition, but working together.  In this way we can all elevate the quality of our art.
Also, whatever artists are highlighted should be madea available to the public.  Noty only would it help those particular artit, it would help generate a respect for GCU as a quality artist community.  A place where they can get cards that have "above the norm" images and messages.
But, this is just my personal opinion.

We have considered privately showing each artist their own ranking.  Most likely based strictly on total cards sold.  I'd like to hear opinions from more artists on this topic.  Thumbs up, thumbs down and why.  
 
Along the same lines of David's suggestions, we do have sorts and views in place to represent "top cards" or "best cards" for shoppers without being so overt on who the top selling artists are.  We will continue to find additional ways to do so.
 
The Popular Cards page shows Most Favorited, GCU Picks (our seasonal staff picks), Most Popular, Most Visited, Best/Bulk Sellers):
http://www.greetingcarduniverse.com/community/popular.asp?sort=popular
 
There is a New Cards page however with so many cards added daily it changes by the hour!  So your time featured on that page is short lived:
http://www.greetingcarduniverse.com/community/latest.asp
 
On our wish list is a Favorite Artist feature similar to the Favorite Card feature.  This will allow us to do some great things for individual artists like notify your fan club when you add new cards.  
 
We did have a Rate this Card feature that unfortunately become too self serving and produced biased results.  That has gone away.
 
As many of you prefer to keep your income private, so do we.  Our total sales numbers are not public at this time and we're not ready to share them with the world.  We have however posted that we will be improving the Top Selling Categories report, which will show you which categories the most sales are coming from.
 
As for the Top Keywords report, you really can't get any better than this.  This report is a peek into what shoppers are looking for, right now.  It's actually better than knowing what has sold.  It's a crystal ball telling you what people want to buy.

I personally am a very private person when it comes to income and would not want any of this information public.  I think the best seller and bulk seller information already being provided should be enough information.  In addition, the keyword search information is really helpful.
 
Having said that, I do think Mindy's suggestion of privately showing an artist their ranking would be nice.  I think this could be done on a monthly basis based on sales made for the month.  In this way, artists that have just gotten here and those who have been here for a long time, would all be treated the same, as it would strictly be based on the most recent month of activity.
 
I can understand why some people would be interested in all these statistics, but I also think that maybe the best statistics are those within our own stores.  Find out what your customers like and that will help you more than anything.  I think.
 
Thanks for listening.

I have some of my work on IMAGEKIND.com, a company that produces prints on demand. They show bestselling artists on the front page without revealing numbers. It is interesting,but for me finally without relevance,because I will never produce the art work those bestsellers do. So the conclusion for me is that I`ll never be a bestseller there.  
 
I am very new in greeting cards,but I can feel the temptation to produce for the market and to benchmark your work according to what sells or better what HAS sold !! I believe in greeting cards it is much better to follow your own unique creativity and develop constantly new ideas as what has sold might not sell in the next month. There is a need to develop all the time.
 
A TOP TEN list also would channel/concentrate some of the traffic to those artists or, if the visitor does not like the impression he gets from the TOP TEN, keep traffic away from the rest of artists.  
To publish sales figures of single artists seems not a good thing, because copying designs is a widely spread practise. I can imagine that quite a number of card producers would love us doing trend scouting for free.

Hi,
 
I like the idea of GCU letting each artist know how well they are doing and where they rank, so I vote this idea.
I also like the idea of 'featured artist' and GCU sending out 'emails' to customers of that artist telling them of new stuff, etc. I think customers do gravitate towards artist work/style that they like so this feature would be great to generate more sales/interest for that artist with their existing customers...and the best thing is I don't have to do anything more, its all down to GCU hard work!  
As for any more stats, I'm not really bothered. If the site gets too complicated with stats for this and stats for that I really won't bother looking, I do this for fun not as a business so its wasted on me I'm afraid.

Lots of interesting comments here.  Ones own stats are helpful to a point, but the obsession with comparing art, sales and popularity with other GCU artists??   I don't get it.    For many of us, this is not the only venue where we market our art (cards, prints, whatever).  Yes, we are in competition with other GCU members, but we are also in competition with everyone from Cafe Press to Zazzle, Hallmark to Walmart!  In the time I've been here, I have noticed flocks of cards being posted right after a similar card has been shown as selling well.  
 
I believe that the stores that have the best sales do so because they have many good cards that are profiled well, the owners market in a variety of ways AND the artists spend the lions share of their time CREATING and paying attention to the market as a WHOLE, rather than just what's going on at GCU.  (Not to say that what's going on here isn't great.  The community of the artists is great, but I don't think sharing EVERY detailed stat is helpful or even relevant.)
 
Ernestine
 
*I do like the "Favorited" feature though, as there I go & see the cards of artists' work I like and put an image to a name.