Microstock Photography Stats: 2009 Earnings by Hour of Day
Posted on January 8th, 2010 in Uncategorized | 9 Comments »
If buyers didn’t break for lunch, would sales be higher?
If buyers didn’t break for lunch, would sales be higher?
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9 Responses
This is New York. Definitely a fun chart
How did you manage to account for differnt time zones and the like?
Is the single line of commentary in the post designed to leave the insight and debate up to us?
When you say in the comment above that it's New York, are you looking at only NY sales or all sales but using the NY timezone? Assuming the latter…
How do you know that's lunch time? If the chart is based on New York time, are New Yorkers taking their lunch at 11am? Could it not be that the second peak, around 12 – 1pm, is when the US West coast cities get to work and start buying?
Also, the chart shows that microstock is dominated by the US, or at least countries in the same timezones. What do you think about that Rahul? Do you have any other data on that? Most microstockers report fewer US-based sales in the Shutterstock stats which separate them out – though that may just be Shutterstock.
If it is dominated by US-based sales, then it's interesting to see the chart of earnings per download. People downloading during the day are spending more, presumably to buy larger sizes, presumably because they buy more for print use. Then after-hours purchases are smaller files, perhaps from 'consumers' (non-professional photo buyers) buying for web, blogs, etc. Just a theory. What are your thoughts?
I'd like to know that too, I'm guessing it does not (a file in europe at lunchtime is marked as 6 am?)
the dip is Europe leaving work?
I think you kind of see the same thing in the weekly stats, Monday and Friday also overlap with non-work days Sunday and Saturday in half the world so they look like quieter days but Wednesday records some of Tuesday and Thursday which are both work days.
fun none the less.
I believe that market is US dominated… but consider that on the peak hour of this graph – about between 9 and 10 am NY time – it's about noon in Europe and the two components (buyers) work together. I check every day some Italian internet traffic charts and the two peaks in the day are typically at 12 (noon) and at 4 pm – so we can see a similar trend. Then there are all the Emerging Markets… I can't find anymore an interesting chart representing the number of people at work in the world vs time of the day, that would be the key!
Cheers,
roberto
I completely agree with this. I think we are seeing an overlay of the west coast, east coast and Europe. This would explain the highest peak in the morning (all buyers at work on either side of the ponds), the dip in the middle is probably influenced by lunch, especially as there is a short rise again but then it does tail off which is consistent with the end of the European workday. While stock photography in general may be US dominated, there is no question that all markets play a meaningful role.
I agree with you. The overlay of the european workday definitely has an impact and 100% agree with your day of week point as well.
I was just curious if anyone was paying attention
. Besides, debate in the comments makes a ton of sense to me.
If people weren't leaving for lunch, I think we'd see a second peak (lower than the first due to the end of the European workday) but I don't think we'd see the dip. It's possible that the lunch dip is totally irrelevant and that it is just end of workday in Europe followed by west coast US. I'm not sure if I have a good way to determine that for sure.
I'll dig a bit more to clarify, but as you, Steve & Roberto have pointed out it's the overlay of the respective workdays that we are looking at.
I do think the notion that professional buyers are buying larger sizes for print/large runs etc makes intuitive sense. While the spread doesn't seem large visually, on a percentage basis, the difference between peak – trough on revenue / download is significant. (i.e. a 40c spread doesn't seem like much but it represents a 20% swing when the denominator is $2)
[...] 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 [...]