We would like to congratulate Chris Gramly for having his image featured on istock as the Photo of the Week!
You should check out Chris’s website and his istock portfolio if you haven’t already.
PS: As we’ve blogged about earlier, Valentine’s Day images should start going up now. Happy New Year and Happy Shooting!
We recently rolled out some enhancements to the LookStat site which we hope you’ll find useful. As always, feedback and comments are appreciated.
New Thumbnail Grid
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.
Manual Image Match (Private Beta)
We have added the ability to manually correct the matches made by our system when tracking images across multiple sites. This allows you to break apart incorrect matches and allows you to match images that the system missed. If you’re interested in using this feature, please let me know in the comments, on Twitter or from our contact form. This is an early version of the feature and feedback and suggestions for improvement are much appreciated.
Once activated, you’ll see a link on the left panel of each image detail page (which you get to by clicking on a thumbnail anywhere in your account.)
From here you can click ‘Unmatch’ to remove an incorrect match, or if you select ‘Match Image’ you’ll be taken to a screen that shows the rest of the images in your portfolio.
You can narrow down the list by site. After you match images, it takes about an hour for the system to recompute totals. If portfolio data (see next section) has been activated for your account, you’ll see images sorted by upload date in descending order. If not, they’ll be sorted by date of first sale.
Complete Portfolio & Image Upload Date
We are in the process of rolling out the ability to see all images (not just images with sales data) and to track image upload date in your LookStat account. We will be rolling this functionality out to all users before long but if you’d like it sooner, just let us know and we’ll see what we can do. In the near future, we’ll be using this data to display stats like RPI (that takes into account image age) and sell through rate.
Feedback Appreciated
If you use any of these features, please let us know what you think and how we can make things better. Thanks for all your support and feedback!
Istock’s original post on 2010 changes which we mentioned recently generated some controversy due to changes to their canister levels. They have made some changes and will be grandfathering non-exclusives at their old levels and for exclusive members, they will also climb one level at the old thresholds.
When the canister levels change on February 24, all members will still be grandfathered into their current level, and all Exclusive members will be grandfathered into the old levels for their next canister as well.
We promised we wouldn’t be mean-spirited when we looked at individual cases, but to ease people’s minds, we decided to go with the easiest implemenation. Every Exclusive will still need the same number of downloads to reach their next level.
So if you’re a silver Exclusive now with 2501 downloads, you will still be a silver after February 24. And you will still become gold when you hit 10,000 downloads.
After you’ve passed that next level, you will move into the new canister levels that we outlined in the orignal announcement.
This will apply to anyone who becomes Exclusive before February 24. If you’re interested in becoming Exclusive but will be prevented by other contractual obligations before that cut-off date, get in touch with us and we can work something out. Email us at artists@istockphoto.com before January 11 and we will arrange a wider window that works for you.
Now get out there and have a great holiday everybody. Happy New Year.
You can read the details at their forum.
I was chatting with the CEO of Nearlyweds.com, a Seattle startup that provides beautifully designed wedding websites for newly engaged couples and he mentioned to me that peak wedding planning season is January – May. This is because there are a ton of engagements around New Year’s and another small spike around Valentine’s Day. I decided to dig around to see if I could come up with any useful insights for wedding photographers since they would be selected in the planning phases. While the data and the conclusions may be well known to pro wedding photographers and stock shooters, I felt they were worth sharing.
Wedding Photographers – Peak Searches Occur In January
The peak of search volume for ‘wedding photographers’ occurs in January as you can see from the Google Insight chart above. The top keywords associated with ‘wedding photographers are:
Top Search Terms Related to ‘Wedding Photographer’
If you are a wedding photographer and you don’t yet have an SEO-friendly page that talks about the keyword terms above, you should create one immediately. Write a blog post, put up a simple about page – it doesn’t matter how simple it is, something is better than nothing.
Dresses & Cakes Rule when it comes to Image data
In addition to looking at data on ‘wedding photographers,’ I also looked at search & image trends around ‘wedding’. The main thing that jumped out at me was the importance of dresses & cakes.
Searches for wedding dresses and wedding cakes account for 47% and 33% of the top 10 searches respectively. I’m assuming that wedding photographers know this already. It’s probably worth taking into account from a microstock perspective as well.
2009 Image Search Data for ‘Wedding’
As you can see, in 2009 searches for images related to ‘wedding’ have a spike in January and then climb steadily until July. From a microstock perspective, it’s probably time to start thinking about and planning your wedding-themed shoots.
Brides are More Important than Grooms (much more important.)
I think we all knew this, but the spread in search volume is impressive. The Google Insights data shows roughly 5.5x more searches for brides than grooms. I’m not married, but I’m sure that this search data can be corroborated from primary sources…
Conclusions & Microstock Implications
Business images are some of the best sellers in microstock and it is a competitive category. I plotted 2008 earnings data for images tagged with ‘business’ and also looked into Google Image search trends for the terms ‘business man’ , ‘business people’ and ‘business woman’ in 2008. The results are charted below.
2008 Royalties for Microstock Images Tagged with ‘business’
Apart from the Christmas holidays, sales of business images are strong throughout the year and rise from September to November. I hadn’t expected to see any real variation throughout the year so found this curve shape to be interesting.
I decided to look at Google Image search data for business man, business woman and business people since the generic data for ‘business’ ranked these terms highly in the related searches
2008 Google Image Search Data for ‘Business’
2008 Google Image Data for ‘Business Man’, ‘Business People’ and ‘Business Woman’
There does appear to be a lull in the summer and a drop off at Christmas. It isn’t as pronounced as the microstock data, however. I found it interesting that ‘business people’ was more common than ‘business woman.’ This has remained true in the 2009 data but the gap between the three terms has closed.
Business Man
Business People
Business Woman
Some Observations
Business images are a competitive category and as Lee has stated in his long tail post - if you’re going to compete in it, you will be competing on quality. Some observations that may help:
Jonathan Ross has been one of our earliest LookStat users on analytics and was one of our earliest customers on our Back Office services. He has been a pleasure to work with and is always generous with his insight and experience.
RM, RF, Microstock, Video, you name it, Jonathan does it. He’s has been an advocate of operating at every level of the stock industry and we’ve been fortunate to work with him on his microstock endeavors. You can find Jonathan on Twitter – he’s @jonathanjross – follow him. you won’t regret it.
Thanks for the unwavering support Jonathan. We’re excited to be working with you!
Istock has a post on their front page blog about 2009 and their plans for 2010. A couple of things jumped out at me, all of which bode well for microstock in the months to come. The first (and perhaps most important) – continued growth on the buyer side:
For those who foolishly insist microstock isn’t an expanding market, we point to the 125,000 new members iStock adds each month. 10 years ago when we started, there were barely that many stock buyers in North America, let alone added to one company in a month. And these are often new buyers to the stock image market. There is very little cross-over between Getty Images’ ‘classic’ customer base and our own.
And, the second, the emergence of additional tiers at different price points. Essentially, the microstock industry is finding ways to deliver imagery to buyers at different price points according to their requirements. I think this is a good thing and a sign of the maturation of the market into one that serves all levels of buyers.
One other point that will affect contributors is adjusting the canister requirements upwards. Although existing users will be grandfathered in to their current levels, newer contributors will see higher hurdles. As you might expect, this change is causing quite a bit of activity on their forum.
Base: 1 – 499
Bronze: 500 – 4,999
Silver: 5,000 – 19,000
Gold: 20,000 – 49,000
Diamond: 50,000 – 399,000
Black Diamond: 400,000 +
These changes will take place on Feb 24, 2010, according to the post.
The microstock market is a dynamic one and it will be exciting to see how things evolve over the next year.
While doing some research on general marketing trends, I came across an interesting Brandweek article on Hispanic Marketing titled “Hispanic Market is Set to Soar” which was published on Nov 2, 2009.
While I think the fact that the Hispanic segment is growing is probably relatively well known, the article talks about the emergence of ‘second-generation, bilingual, bicultural consumers.” The implication of this from a marketing perspective was illustrated very well by a quote from Cristina Vilella, Director of Marketing for McDonald’s USA:
“We lead with Hispanic insights but make sure they appeal to the general market.”
The article is a good quick read and it’ll be interesting to see how the macro trends show up in microstock sales over the next few months and years.
(As an aside, the article is illustrated with a microstock photo – “Family Having Fun by Andresr“)
Ellen has shared some great insight in her comment which was non-obvious to me. I’ve updated the end of the post to include her thoughts.
Given that it’s (American) football season, I decided to take a look at microstock earnings stats for ‘football’ and also decided to look at the stats for ‘soccer’ while I was at it.
2008 Microstock Earnings Data for ‘football’ vs ‘soccer’ by Month
The two lines track very closely until the summer when you start to see the line for ‘football’ show an increase. This isn’t surprising since every image tagged with ‘soccer’ is probably also tagged with ‘football’. Thus, to a rough degree, you’d expect solid overlap until the American Football season in the USA starts up in the summer.
I decided to compare this with data from Google Insights for search for the same search terms and limit the results to Image Search Data for 2008 in the USA.
As you can see, the form of the curves is quite similar to the microstock sales data in the prior chart. I expect there to be more congruence between the two charts over time as microstock sites improve their SEO. One point to keep in mind is that the US data is the only level at which you see this curve shape. Soccer is a much more popular sport when viewed at a global level.
Microstock Implications (Updated with Ellen Boughn’s terrific comment)
There can be no question that globally, soccer is a much more popular game than American football. However, there is a discernible bump associated with the American football season in the United States. While it’s a small fraction of the total sales for the ‘football’ category of images, it is not insignificant and probably worth adding to your portfolio.
Via Ellen Boughn (who is awesome!) – Follow her: @ellenboughn on Twitter
Globally soccer is more popular, but globally America has the largest percentage of any country of stock photo buyers…distorting the need for football pics over soccer. Yet the most popular sport in the US…with respect to the number of people involved…is kid’s soccer. So shoot US football that can pass as pro or college and kids 13 and younger playing soccer. I should also mention that girl’s soccer is really important.
Steve Gibson (@microstockin on Twitter) at Microstock Insider has a couple of great posts up that are well worth your time. The first is a post about popular search keywords and the second, from last year, is about seasonal stock images.
Lots of good data and exploration of the relationship between popular searches/data on Google vs. search data from a free stock site that Steve has access to. He concludes that the correlation is quite high, but there are likely to be situations where the two diverge. I think this is absolutely true. Not every search query makes sense on microstock.
Having said, that, I think it’s important to remember that just because a topic isn’t well covered already, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t demand for it. The beauty of microstock is that it is possible to test the waters by shooting some more experimental concepts and examining the results in views and sales. PicNiche can also help you figure this out.
In general, if people are looking for something, there’s a high likelihood that marketers will try and advertise it to them. (Of course, you have to figure out where in the long tail you are operating to figure out how much to invest in that image.)