Running/Jogging was at the top of list of fastest growing leisure activities in the USA in 2008. As part of our series on profiling these sports, we’re looking at search and general trends and then examining search results from a range of stock and microstock sites.

Search Trends: Women, Men & Shoes

Women's vs. Men's Running

Although it’s close, there are more searches for women’s running than those for men and ‘shoes’ is the most common search term associated with both gender’s searches. This isn’t all that surprising if you consider that most of the dollars spent in running is likely spent on shoes. Shoes aside, other terms that showed up highly in searches were: ‘trail running’ and ‘running shorts.’

NB: One other item that will be important for your IPTC Titles – ‘Women’s running’ generated 50% more monthly searches than ‘Womens Running’. The same was true for ‘Men’s’ vs. ‘Mens’. Google thinks the apostrophe is significant; you should too.

Participation by Age Group

Participation by Age

Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States/NSGA

Things that stood out:

  • There are a lot of people in their mid-forties to mid-fifties who are running
  • The 25-34 age group is probably a sweet spot for marketers, because they are the biggest segment and they probably earn more than the 18-24 age group

Stock Searches for ‘Running’

As part of this profile, we looked at the number of search results for the term ‘running’ on some major stock agencies, top microstock sites, and Flickr. The results are plotted on the chart below (except for Flickr, which returned 3.7 million results thus making everyone else look non-existent.)

Number of Images by Site

Things that stood out:

  • Shutterstock has the most returned images by far. It has 3+ times as many images as iStock for example, but the total library size isn’t that much larger. Therefore there are proportionally more running images at SS than at iStock. I’m not really sure why this should be true, but it is interesting nonetheless.
  • Getty has almost as many images for ‘running’ as iStock, Fotolia & Dreamstime. I was somewhat surprised since I expected that Getty’s collection would be much more tightly edited.

Links to Search Results for ‘Running’

Corbis

Corbis Search Results

Dreamstime

Dreamstime-running-relevance

Fotolia

Fotolia-running-relevance

Getty

Getty-running

iStockphoto

iStock-running-bestmatch

Shutterstock

Shutterstock-running-mostpopular

Flickr

Flickr-running-relevant

Conclusions

  • Shoot a mix of genders and age groups
  • Shoes are searched for often. While ‘running shoes’ should be on your metadata, there is a chance that it may be less relevant for stock since the shoe companies are going to be shooting their own products on people’s feet.
  • The apostrophe’s are significant. If the term is relevant to your image, use Women’s and Men’s in your IPTC headings & descriptions.