Microstock Photography Analytics – Thanksgiving Images
Posted on November 9th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 9 Comments »
One of the things that interests me around seasonal holidays is the timing of changes in sales velocity of microstock images associated with those holidays. The goal is to identify when to shoot & upload images in order to benefit the most from the seasonal spikes in interest.
The chart below shows a 7-day moving average of the royalties for images with the keyword ‘thanksgiving’ in 2008 and it also overlays the daily mean for those images on the same chart.
2008 Royalties for Images Tagged with ‘Thanksgiving’
The royalties crossed the daily average for the year on August 22, peaked on November 23rd and then dropped off from there. The total volume of royalties between August 22 & November 28 accounted for over 63% of the year’s total. You had to be in early to maximize your benefit, but it would have been worthwhile to continue submitting images throughout September & October.
It seems reasonable to see sales start to climb three months before the holiday itself, but it was interesting to see them peak so close to the actual date of Thanksgiving, which was November 27, 2008 in the USA. I’m speculating here but, the early start would seem to coincide with the print & retail calendars and the continued strength suggests more online uses as we got closer to the holiday itself.
(As an aside, it may make sense to buy props and shoot immediately after a holiday when prices are low and your outdoor shots will still look season appropriate. I’m sure some of you out there are already doing exactly this.)
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this if you get a chance. What has your experience been with seasonal images?
9 Responses
Interesting analysis which seems to be in contrary to popular knowledge that holiday related work starts months before.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Is there a working rule of thumb around lead time? Have you found it to be longer than 3 months?
Let's ask this – could you post Christmas and Valentine's charts?
working on it now
Nice. Yeah, I would be interested to see Christmas as well. It seems very logical that there would be a lot of use (purchase) for images the week before or week of an event. I would also guess that as more private people start purchasing images, we will see an increase in purchases right before an event.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rahul Pathak, rmarinello. rmarinello said: Another great #microstock stats post from @LookStat (by Rahul): …Analytics – Thanksgiving Images http://is.gd/4RDZZ [...]
Thanks Tyler. For some reason, I had expected buying to tail off sooner but I think you're right about the rise of the individual buyer. We're working on Christmas & Valentine's Day. Given lead times, I need to publish this stuff at least 3 months early
[...] Easter was on March 23, 2008 in the USA. As you can see from the chart above, the 7-day moving average crosses the daily mean about two months before the holiday itself. In this case, January 5. The peak of the curve is one week before the holiday on March 16. This is very similar to the patterns I saw in the Thanksgiving data. [...]
[...] the time to begin uploading seasonal images seems to be 2-3 months ahead of an event (see our Thanksgiving & Easter posts) and shoots need to happen well before that, we will be profiling the top [...]