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.)