Microstock Photography Trends – Active Seniors – What They’re Doing in the Photos
Posted on May 5th, 2010 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
As part of an ongoing series of posts about active seniors (see part 1 & part 2), I took at look at what the models were doing in the best selling images. The table below shows the Top 60 images (Top 20 @ iStock, Fotolia & Dreamstime) categorized by what people are doing in the photos.
The most common activity by far is hugging. It’s interesting that images of seniors hugging perform slightly worse than average from a downloads per image perspective. Also, I realize that hugging is a loose interpretation of activity, but I’m the messenger here. 14 of 17 images were couples hugging; (2 were friends and 1 was of grandparent/grandson.) Love must get stronger with age 
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Whoa! What an eye-opener. There's a lot of good data here, and it creates some suggestions about how I should be researching markets.
(and this post is NICE AND SHORT).
Glad you found it helpful. Also, feedback re: short is duly noted
Rahul
Interesting. How did you selected Top 60 images? By downloads? It still makes hugging most demanded topic. If there were only 2 images available with senior couples hugging, the DLs/Image ratio would have been highest, and would have made them highest performing images. Now we can see that competition is just higher on that topic, but it still most wanted by buyers. It also shows that photographers are well educated. They know their buyers needs. Mostly.
I think you're spot on Maigi. I think hugging is right around the average in DL/image and there are a lot of images so the market seems somewhat in balance there. I'd say for the images with much higher earnings/DL, there may be opportunities worth exploring.