About This Post

This post is the first in a two part series analyzing the top 20 best-selling images for ‘active seniors’ from iStock, Dreamstime & Fotolia. There’s too much data for one post hence my decision to split them up into a series. (By way of information, the image above is the best-selling image for ‘active seniors’ on iStock and has over 4,300 downloads.)

Part 1 will focus on the number of people in the images, ethnicity & common themes. Part 2 will focus on where they are, what they are doing and cross segmentation.

PS: If you want the spreadsheet with the raw data (which contains image IDs, sites, views data, pivot tables and charts for your own use), please tweet about this post or share it on Facebook and I’ll email you a download link.

Methodology

I collected data for the Top 20 most downloaded images from iStock, Dreamstime & Fotolia and categorized them by theme to see which factors were shared across the best-sellers. I’m not a photo editor, so this is not an aesthetic assessment; it’s an analytical look at trends across the best-selling images. I scored the images in the following ways:

  • Number of men, women & children
  • Ethnicity of Models
  • Theme – e.g. couples, grandparents, friendship
  • Location & Setting – indoors vs. outdoors etc
  • Activities
  • Where People are Looking
  • Views & Downloads

Note, that in this post, I’m highlighting correlation, but not causation. This is an exploration of the data associated with the Top 20 images from 3 sites. Also, given the small image counts in certain categories, outliers may have a disproportionate impact on the data.

The above caveats aside, I think it’s very instructive to look at your images in this way. You can do this on LookStat by using our ‘Collections’ feature. I’ll have a post on how to do this soon.

Number of People

The chart above is sorted by downloads per image based on the number of people in the image. As you can see, two people shots dominate both in terms of total views & downloads as well as in terms of downloads per image.

Digging further in to the 45 images with two people in them, 82% were of couples. (The others were 2 friends & a grandparent & grandchild.) The downloads per image for these subgroups were: Couples – 781.3, 2 Friends – 877.8, Grandparent & grandchild – 1079.3.

Ethnicity

As you can see from the charts above, while there are significantly more downloads associated with images of Caucasian models, the downloads per image data for both African American & shots of groups is significantly higher than the mean for the set which was 777.1 downloads per image. One of the challenges here is that analyzing all-time data in this way doesn’t give you a sense for velocity. I’m a little surprised that there isn’t more diversity in terms of ethnic backgrounds in the best-selling images.

Common Themes

Points to note:

  • Couples refer to a man and woman and they are typically hugging or holding hands. (more on this in Part 2)
  • Friendship images were typically those involving 2 women. I was surprised that there were no images of 2 men in a photo together.

Conclusions

  • Two is the most common number of people in best-selling images for active seniors. Of those images, 80+% are of couples, but the images with the highest Downloads per Image are those of a grandparent with a grandchild. (Couples – 781.3, 2 Friends – 877.8, Grandparent & grandchild – 1079.3)
  • There were no images of two men together engaged in any activity in the top 60 best sellers; the 5 images of friendship were typically of two female friends.
  • 92% of the images in the top 60 were of ‘Caucasian’ models only. While the numbers are small, the downloads per image data suggest that there is an opportunity to explore ‘active senior’ themes with more ethnic diversity.

Analyzing this at the site level is great, but one thing you can do with LookStat is to set up collections to analyze all this. Since images can live in more than one collection, setting up overlapping segments is straightforward and you can then start to compare your data with bestsellers. I’ll post more on how to do this next week. Some of the features in our new beta really take this sort of thing to another level and I’m excited to share it with you all.

Feedback Request

Please comment and let me know if you think this sort of post is helpful & valuable to you. Also, if you have thoughts on whether downloads per image is a relevant proxy for opportunity, I’d be curious to hear about that as well.