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.

Football vs. Soccer

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

Microstock Sales for Football vs. Soccer

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.

Google Image Search Data for Football vs. Soccer

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.