LookStat – Microstock Analytics

Summer is just around the corner, from a shoot planning perspective.

Since 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 leisure activities in the USA early. Similar to our hunting post, I’ll be looking at search trends and highlighting the best-selling stock images associated with those activities.

When deciding to post a list of the top activities, the metric you choose to rank on is important. I’ve included the fastest growing as well as those with the highest number of participants in this post. (We looked at the top activities based on consumer spending last week.)

Fastest Growing Leisure Activities in the USA

The chart below shows the ten fastest growing leisure activities in the USA, measured by the % increase in participation from 2007 to 2008 (2009 data is not yet available.) These data are from the National Sporting Goods Association.

Since growth rates by themselves aren’t meaningful, I’ve included a data table which lists the number of participants and the number added from 2007 to 2008. The data are ranked by growth rate and the top activities in terms of participation are highlighted in bold.

• Running didn’t surprise me much since it’s so easy to get started.
• I was a little surprised by the popularity of ‘exercising with equipment’ especially as it is not the same as ‘working out at a club/gym’ as you can see from the table below.
• Snowboarding grew a lot, but off a small base.
• Even though baseball may be ‘America’s pastime,’ soccer had more participants.
• Yoga was bigger and grew faster than baseball or soccer.

Top 10 Leisure Activities Based on Number of Participants in 2008

• I didn’t expect bowling or fishing to be that high on the list (probably my own biases at work.)
• I think age segmentation will be important. For example, I expect the participation in walking to skew older. (I’ll try and address this aspect in the individual sport profiles.)

Stay Tuned (And Share What You’re Interested In)

Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing activity profiles regularly. I’ll be focusing on the fastest-growing list but will leave out winter sports for now since they won’t be of much use from a shoot planning perspective. (If you’d like to see them anyway, let me know.)

As always, if there’s a specific topic you’d like to see covered, please let me know and I’ll see if we can work it in.

After my surprising discovery that hunting was the sport with the highest per participant spend in the USA, I decided that a quick snapshot of the activity and the search results for ‘hunting’ on stock photography and image websites was in order.

Google Insights for ‘Hunting’

To get a sense for seasonality, I checked Google Insights for Search for hunting search trends from 2008 to the present.

There’s a clear seasonal trend that starts in July and peaks in November. From a stock perspective, 2-3 months is the lead time so April/May is when you want to be uploading hunting related images.

Global Monthly Search Volume (in Millions) for ‘Hunting’ via the Adwords Query Tool

As you can see from the chart above, ‘deer hunting’ as a group of two terms (hunting deer & deer hunting) accounts for 2 million monthly searches. Taken together, these two terms are almost three times larger than the search term immediately below them. It’s also instructive to look at the related keywords.

Global Monthly Volume (in Millions) – Related Keywords (via Adwords Query Tool)

It’s useful to look at not just the term itself, but also related terms:

Clearly, ‘rifles’ and ‘outdoors’ are where the action is. One point to note – given that ‘rifle’ is so much more prevalent than ‘rifles’ you may want to consider using the singular form in your title and description. This is because of the fact that those two IPTC fields become the Page Title which is important for SEO.

Show me the Searches

I decided to search a handful of stock photo sites and order the results by downloads (where possible) to see what turned up.

iStockphoto search for ‘hunting’

Fotolia Search for ‘Hunting’

Dreamstime Search for ‘Hunting’

I found it fascinating that both Dreamstime & Fotolia had business shots in their top search results. The keywords in question were related to ‘job hunting.’ I checked a couple of other USA based sites and they all had recreational hunting related imagery on their top search results. I would guess that this is a reflection of a cultural difference. Another interesting thing is that the most download image from Fotolia & Dreamstime is the same one (but almost 6 times as many downloads on Fotolia than on Dreamstime.)

Conclusions & Impact on Stock Shoots

• Hunting, outdoors, rifles, deer – these are your top terms in the USA (for your title & description, ‘rifle’ may be better than ‘rifles’)
• The growth in search volume begins in June. As a result, you should start uploading in March/April
• Don’t fixate on the meaning of a term that’s most familiar or you might miss other interpretations e.g. ‘house-hunting’ or ‘job-hunting.’

I’m planning a series of posts on summer sports and activities (and related keywords etc) to help with your shoot planning.

While doing some background research I came across a couple of very interesting data repositories at the Census & The National Association of Sporting Goods Manufacturers.

I was playing around with the data for consumer spending and participation and decided to run a quick analysis on the average spending per participant for each of the Top 5. The data blew me away.

Top 5 Recreational Pursuits by Spending

NB: Spending & Participation Data in Millions; Source: NSGA

The Fastest Growing of the Top 5? Hunting…

Source: NSGA

Things That Surprised Me

To be honest, almost everything about the data above surprised me. I expected golf to top the total and per person spending charts and I definitely didn’t expect hunting to be on this chart in the first place.

Based on my surprise around hunting & golf, I decided to do a quick search on iStock & Getty Images to see how many results showed up for stock imagery around these subjects. I expected more golf than hunting shots all around.

At iStock, there were 16,576 images returned for a search for ‘golf’ and 6,806 images returned for a search on ‘hunting’. So far so good. I expected to see the same thing at Getty but it was not to be. Getty returns 10,291 results for golf and 12,990 results for hunting. I’m not really sure how to explain the fact that there are more hunting images at Getty but if you have some ideas, please share them in the comments.

Conclusions & Observations

I’m going to have to add hunting to the list of activities that I profile over the next few weeks!

If you believe that how much someone is willing to spend on something is a proxy for how much a marketer will spend to sell them that something, then hunting is clearly an important activity to study.

A Small Request

If you’ve read this far and you found this post interesting, please tweet about it, follow us on twitter, or leave a comment on our blog. In return, I will contact you to get your vote on which activities you’d like to see us profile in our sports/leisure series.

If you help us share our content, the least we can do is make sure we listen when figuring out what to write about next. (Of course, if you just write to me, I will listen anyway, but that is neither here nor there.)

Thanks for reading this far.

Which of Title, Description & Keywords matter for search? The short answer is:

“All of them”

Here’s why.

As you can see from the table above, all of the fields have a role to play in either the Page Title or a site’s search. As a result, so you need to make sure that they all contain the top keywords for your image.

Page Title Tag
This is the sentence that shows in the top of your browser when viewing a web page. If you view the source of a web page, it is the <Title> element

The  Page Title Tag is the most important on-page factor from a search crawler’s perspective. As a result, the words in your title tag are crucial for searches on Google and other search engines. Three of the four sites above use the IPTC title for their browser title tag and Shutterstock uses the description. So, regardless of what you think of them, those fields matter a lot. Even though iStock, Shutterstock and Fotolia ignore everything but the keywords in their search results, the fact that Google cares means you need to care.

Oh, one more thing – Dreamstime and Fotolia both have a character limit and truncate inputs. So, the bottom line? You have 50 characters in which to be relevant. Put your most important terms up front.

On-site Search
As you can see from the table, the microstock sites use some or all of the meta data fields in their search algorithms. I think we are all sold on the value of keywords, even for on-site search but Title & Description also have an important role to play. In fact, at Dreamstime, I think an exact match on title gets you the highest placement in search results (even above keywords.) I was able to get searches to return for words that only existed in the IPTC Title.

Talk is Cheap – Show Me the Searches!
All this becomes very clear with a few examples. I did a search on istock for ‘friendship’ and I picked the image highlighted below.

The title tag for this image is: “Two Women having Fun Outdoor (XXXL).” If you search google images for “two women fun outdoors”, this image is the second result. (This is a good thing.)

If you search iStock for “two women fun outdoors” the image is nowhere to be seen. While it has ‘fun’ in its keywords, it doesn’t have “two women.” And if you search for images on Google with keywords like ‘friendship’ you are not going to find that image.

Conclusions

• Title, Description & Keywords should all contain relevant terms
• Your page titles matter more than you think – for on site & for Google search; don’t ignore them
• You have 50 characters for the title – make them count; put important keywords first

As part of our Back Office Services, we pay attention to these items. You should too.

Given that Valentine’s Day is around the corner and I’ve already posted about Easter, I thought I would take a look at the other upcoming holidays. As part of this research, I found some fascinating stats on on number of greeting cards sent by occasion at Hallmark.com. I’ve added the table below.

I was a little surprised to see Mother’s Day so high on the list. The fact that 50% more cards are sent on Mother’s Day vs. Father’s day is interesting as well. Also, according to Hallmark’s page on Mother’s Day, this is the largest card-sending holiday for the Hispanic community. As a quick test, I did a search on iStock for ‘Mother’s Day’ and sort by downloads – three of the top 5 images have ‘Latin American & Hispanic Ethnicity’ in their keywords.

iStock – Ordered by Downloads

I also thought it would be interesting to take a look at the first row of results that get returned on the default search sort order from iStock, Getty, Corbis & Flickr

Corbis – Best Match

Flickr – Relevance

Getty Images – Default Sort

iStockphoto – Best Match

In general, there’s a similar feel to the stock images but Flickr stands out with the dominance of floral shots in the top search results. Not sure what to make of that pattern but I wouldn’t recommend shooting more flowers. The agencies have more than enough of those.

In terms of what wasn’t there, I was a little surprised not to see more ‘breakfast in bed’ and ‘mum chilling out’ type shots. Another odd thing to me was that there were virtually no men in any of the shots. Given than 2007 was a peak in US history for new births, I thought I’d see more ‘young mother & husband & baby’ images.

Things to Note

• Mother’s Day in the USA is Sunday, May 9th in 2010 (if seasonal microstock trends hold, then 2-3 months before is the time to start uploading)
• Gifts, cards, brunch & flowers are the top related search keywords

I’d love to hear your perspectives on what has and hasn’t worked in your mother’s day shots. In any case, I’m going to make sure I don’t short change my Dad this year.

It’s not stock photography, but Mashable has an interesting post about profile pics and dating responses on OKCupid. The post is about profile pics and stats; the results will probably surprise you.

The myths:

• It’s Better to Smile
• Phone & Webcam Photos are Creepy
• Leave Something to the Imagination
• Let them see you face

As always, pay attention to the numbers!

Also, here’s the the original post on OKCupid (nice work & great post!)

Maigi has a great post on Dreamstime which pulls together all of Ellen’s blog posts that she wrote while she worked there. It’s a great resource and although it’s an old post, it was new to me and the advice in there is timeless. Well worth your time.

Article categories include:

• Best Sellers Tips
• Tips & Tricks
• Creativity & Inspiration
• Topics & categories

UPDATE: I added a chart of average % of traffic by country across all the sites. I think it’s more informative than the visits chart.

The comments on my post last week about sales & time of day spurred me to take a look at traffic  by geography for some of the larger microstock sites. I used Alexa to get traffic breakdown by country and then took the November 2009 visitor numbers from Compete for each site. By combining these two data sets, I was able to come up with a list of visitors by country. The sites in question were: 123rf, Dreamstime, Fotolia iStockphoto, Shutterstock & Stockxpert. My hypothesis is that traffic is a reasonable proxy for buyers since submitter traffic will barely register on this scale. (millions of buyers vs. hundreds of thousands of contributors.)

Millions of Visitors by Country to 123, DT, FT, IS, SS, SXP

There are a number of issues and caveats with this data.

• I assumed that the traffic was independent and merely added the number of visitors for each country. This is likely inaccurate as there is probably a fair amount of overlap. Still, directionally, I think the data is reasonable.
• India as the #2 country really surprised me and I think it’s more likely to be an issue with the Alexa country level data as opposed to anything else. If you ignore India, then USA, Germany, UK as big markets for microstock make sense to me.
• Japan seemed fairly low down for such a large economy. Again, either a data issue, or there are localized sites that are important that I’m not aware of.

Average % of Traffic by Country to 123, DT, FT, IS, SS, SXP (Average of Alexa data by country for each site)

% of Traffic by Country for Each Site

In addition to the total traffic above, I thought it would be instructive to plot the composition of each site’s traffic on a chart to show at a glance where their traffic was coming from.

As you can easily see, most of the sites have very similar traffic profiles, except Fotolia which gets a large share of its traffic from Germany. The same caveat about India applies here. The other thing that’s clear from this site is how quickly things drop off after the top three countries.

Conclusions

I think there are too many questions about the underlying data to draw too many concrete conclusions, but there probably is some directional validity here. Regardless, take any conclusions with a healthy serving of salt.

If you take the numbers at face value, then USA, Germany and the UK account for 49.8% of the total traffic to these sites based on the methodology above. If you consider traffic as an imperfect, but reasonable proxy for buyers, then it’s important to think about themes in these three countries that should be present as you plan your shoots.

If anyone has thoughts, questions, or opinions other than data anomalies about why India shows up as #2, I’d love to hear them. Also, I’d love to know if the list of countries lines up with your experience in the industry.

Last week I wrote about total earnings and downloads and the trends associated with pricing, downloads and earnings. In this post, I looked at the same data and adjusted for active users in that year to get an average per user for the year in question. The results are shown below (the earnings per download line is carried over from last week.)

User-adjusted Earnings and Downloads 2002-2009

Key Takeaways

• Declining downloads per user after 2007
• Slowing growth in earnings per user
• Increasing earnings per download

Although earnings per user have continued to rise, the downloads per user peaked in 2007 and have since declined about 20% from 2007 to 2009. These data support some of the things I heard at PDN and UGCX about flat downloads and increased earnings driven by price increases.

Increasing Competition & Higher Standards

As more contributors enter microstock, especially in a down economy when people are looking for other sources of income, there has been an increasing sense  that it is harder than ever to make money in microstock. If you layer on tougher acceptance standards, you can make a case that new contributors will have a tougher time establishing themselves in the market. This then suggests lower downloads and lower earnings per contributor

Competition isn’t the Whole Story

Increased competition and tougher standards only account for part of what is happening. I think there is no question that new contributors and images are entering the market at increasing rates. If the growth of new users exceeds the growth of the overall downloads, then we’ll see a decline in the per user averages. If increasing competition was the only factor however, we would also expect to see a decline in earnings per user. Clearly, this is not the case. Also, one thing that isn’t clear here is if competition is actually hurting established players or whether new entrants are just struggling without creating an impact on existing users. (A cohort analysis could help illuminate this but that is a post for another day.)

On Average, Users Are Earning More

Price increases by the agencies and increased pricing of individual images as they begin selling more are factors driving up user earnings. As contributors gain experience and their images sell, they benefit from increased pricing for their images as well as better placement in search results. There is a little survivor bias at work – you only stick around if you’re seeing success. It is interesting that this effect is more than compensating for the reduction due to competition, market factors etc.

Conclusions

It is harder to break in to microstock and succeed but there is no question that the market has grown overall, through difficult times. While there are many new entrants and standards are rising, increasing earnings per user suggest there is still opportunity in the market.

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts and interpretation in the comments.

If buyers didn’t break for lunch, would sales be higher?