Microstock RPI & Image Formats (and why it’s not as cool as you might think to be square)
Posted on October 25th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 17 Comments »
The conventional wisdom is that photographers should shoot both horizontal and vertical formats and that square images do better because they stand out in search results (see screenshot below.)
The reasoning here is that square images take up more pixels in a thumbnail grid and therefore stand out. While this may be true, it’s instructive to look at the volume and earnings per image data to see what this really means.
Relative Image Volume in 2008
As you can see, photographers are getting good at rotating the camera while shooting. There are equal numbers of horizontal and vertical images being submitted. Square images lag behind, but that’s to be expected since it takes a little extra effort on the part of the photographer to frame and crop the shot.
Royalties Per Image in 2008
The sales data tell a very clear story – horizontal images earned 2x per image what the other formats did. While square images may take up more pixel area on a row of thumbnail results, they are not driving revenue to the same degree.
As food for thought, it’s interesting to note that all computer screens are in horizontal format and given the rise of online vs. print advertising, maybe these data aren’t that surprising after all. Also, given that most of us are pressed for time, microstock buyers may just not be willing to invest the time needed to crop a square image to their liking.
The bottom line, I still think it makes sense to give buyers a choice but you have to pay attention to the numbers to really see what’s going on.
LookStat collections makes it easy to do this sort of analysis on your microstock sales stats.
17 Responses
Microstock companies should take a page from the Flickr book and offer both square and original format. Also more subjects are available in horizontal so some downloads might have increased in the square format if the subjects available in that format were more widely dispersed.
Great point about how availability might lead to more sales, Ellen. Thanks for weighing in!
Fascinating information about how conventional wisdom is not backed up by the stats. We should always be checking out the real deal facts versus our assumptions.
Thanks for the comment, Anne-Marie. Always eye-opening to look at the stats behind the assumptions
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rahul Pathak, MicrostockExp. MicrostockExp said: RT @lookstat new blog post on #microstock RPI and image formats – http://bit.ly/dontbsquare #stockphotography [...]
Thanks Rahul, nice use of your analytics data, as usual.
I also think that square format could have a better market. Vertical is good to have covers on the magazines… probably is not the main purpose of microstock, but Time Magazine is there
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by lookstat: new blog post on #microstock RPI and image formats – http://bit.ly/dontbsquare #stockphotography…
I am a bit surprised, that horizontals earn twice as much as verticals, because I agree with your suggestion that horizontals are mainly for online, verticals for print, but print requires higher file sizes that cost much more, so I would have guessed that verticals earn more.
[...] free trial for 25 images keyworded, uploaded and submitted to up to 10 microstock agencies and some exceptionally useful analysis of the images LookStat monitors with their analytics tools. Lanny Ziering, John Lund and Jack [...]
I didn't think it would such a discrepancy. Doing my own analysis, I did find that my verticals are earning about 20% more per sale than my horizontals. So I assume this just means that print purchases are sold for higher sizes that web (not surprising).
[...] into the data they’ve collected from all their customers. Check the LookStat blog for why it’s not cool to be square and cats versus dogs. Last month LookStat went from a free microstock analytics site to a [...]
[...] their series of anonymous analytics from their contributors with a very interesting look at portrait v landscape v square images, followed by an analysis of beer v wine stock images and Easter photos. The results rhyme with [...]
[...] We have upgraded our thumbnail grid on the site to show image orientation. While it’s not as clean visually as square thumbnails, image format is an important part of analyzing sales and this was the primary driver of the change. (Thanks for the feedback on this one!) The new thumbnails coupled with the collections feature will allow you to analyze the sales of different image formats such as horizontal, vertical, square etc. I’d love to hear if your data mirror what we saw in our aggregate analysis of 2008 image format data. [...]
[...] isn’t really all that surprising. When we last analyzed the impact of shooting horizontal vs. vertical vs. square across millions of transactions, we came to the same conclusion – Revenue per image for Horizontal shots was twice that of [...]
Eye-opening analysis as always Rahul. While I would have expected the 1×1 sales to be lower or lowest, I did not expect to see the horizontal (landscape) so far out in front of the vertical (portrait). The explanation of web vs. print helped resolve that in my mind; thanks.
I doubt many agencies would accept a 1×1 version of the same image being submitted in other aspect ratios.
So is NOT shooting in multiple orientations on Ellen's list of what we do wrong?
I think agencies do accept all three formats (but don't quote me on that.) I hope not rotating the camera is on there – easily done in most cases & important.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.
Rahul
Yep NOT shooting in multiple formats is on my list of what to do wrong!