Microstock Photography Stats & Google Image Search Trends for ‘Business’
Posted on December 10th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
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:
- Business images sell well all year round. No real surprise here.
- Suits rule! One thing that is new in 2009 is that ‘business casual’ made the top 10 list of image searches for ‘business.’ Will be interesting to see if that continues
- Keywords I would pay attention to: ‘happy, working, professional, suit, talking, black, meeting, black, old, suit, casual.’
- I found it interesting that ‘business card’ and ‘business cards’ were the top two searches for ‘business’ on Google Images.
- ‘black’ was the only ethnic modifier in the top 10. I would have expected to see ‘hispanic’ as well. By the way, the top result on Google image search for ‘black business woman’ is a Fotolia image. The only other microstock site in the top 12 is istock. It should be no surprise that the image on Fotolia is in their Infinite Collection.
7 Responses
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The idea of a gray haired CEO in a suit as a business leader is rather passe. Users want authentic looking business leaders that reflect the current business community: that means women leaders and both men and women looking more like energetic innovators (business casual) and less like Wall Street…especially since Wall Street lost its gloss and a lot of its cred.
Ellen,
Insightful and informative, as always. Thanks a ton for taking the time to share your perspective. This makes perfect sense, especially in the current business environment.
Rahul
Thank you so much for the insightful information that you post so often! Your blog is my favorite place to go while I am uploading stock images!
Brooke,Flattery will get you everywhere! Seriously though, thanks for reading and for the kind words.Rahul
I know this is an old post but I wanted to make a comment. "Black as an ethnic modifier" probably showed up while hispanic didn't because of black business suits, black computers and other black business items such as iphones that aren't necessarily ethnic. Hispanic isn't a color for a suit yet.
(Unless you're somehow eliminating those images that have black but not the color…in which case ignore me)
great point Matt. I'll look into this again.