The chart below shows the Top 10 Leisure Activities in the USA based on number of female participants in 2009.
The chart below shows the Top 10 Leisure Activities in the USA based on the % of participants that are women. This data will help you ensure your shoots are realistic.
The actual number of participants for the above activities are shown below to help you prioritize your efforts. For example, gymnastics and roller-blading appeal to a much smaller segment of the population than walking, working out the gym, or yoga.
Source: National Sporting Goods Association
Points to Note:
- Yoga is close to 80% female, growing, and ranked #11 in terms of total participants. When casting yoga shoots, you should keep this mix in mind.
- I was surprised that walking is 60% female in terms of participation. I normally think of this as a couples concept but the data would suggest women walking together would be a worthwhile concept.
Last year, I posted about the Top 10 Leisure Activities to help with lifestyle shoot planning for the summer. To help with this year’s shoots, I charted updated data from 2001-2009 for the top activities based on 2009 participation numbers.
Source: National Sporting Goods Association – 10 Year Participation Report
Points to Note:
- The Top 5 fastest growing over this period were: Workout at Club, Weight Lifting, Running/Jogging, Exercising w/ Equipment, and Hiking.
- Although Yoga didn’t make the cut (15.7 million participants), it was one of the fastest growing in the last year. Also, 79.4% of yoga participants were female.
In last week’s post about downloads vs. portfolio size, contributors with 5,000-7,500 images online had the highest number of downloads per photographer, on average.
The Top 10 photographers with 5,000-7,500 images online, (ranked by DLs) accounted for 58% (!) of all downloads for the set:
- Mean (average) DLs: 165,404
- Median DLs: 100,000
- Range: 12,000 – 1,100,000
When analyzing stats in microstock, a few strong performers can skew averages. Look beyond the mean to understand what’s happening.
While analyzing data for my last post on downloads per contributor, I became curious about the relationship between downloads per image and portfolio size.
Chart: Total Downloads per Image
- I was surprised to see the spike in downloads per image in the middle band.
- I blame exceptional performers, rather than a magic trend favoring those with 5,000-7,500 images online.
- Downloads per image decline (mostly) as portfolio size increases, but at a slower rate.
Conclusions:
If you keep uploading, your earnings will rise, but at a slower rate than your portfolio does. Although this seems depressing, it shouldn’t be.
- You’ll make more as you upload more.
- You can fight the trend by improving your skills and analyzing your portfolio to uncover better opportunities.
The strong performers in the middle tier are proof that it’s possible.
Methodology:
I analyzed the portfolio and download data of the Top ~2000 contributors (based on Total Downloads) and plotted:
- Histogram of Number of Photographers versus Portfolio Size
- Average Annual Downloads per Photographer for Each Portfolio Bucket
Chart 1: Histogram of Photographer Count vs. Portfolio Size
- 82% of the photographers in the Top 2,000 have portfolios of 2,500 images, or less.
- The last category is larger than the others because there are so few contributors with portfolios over 10,000 images.
Chart 2: Average Annual Downloads by Portfolio Size
Conclusions:
- I was very surprised to find that less than 20% of photographers in this dataset had portfolios larger than 2,500 images.
- I found the download numbers made more sense since all things being equal, more images should lead to higher earnings.
- I’m curious about average downloads per image for each of the above bands — I’ll post on this subject later this week.
Methodology:
I took the same dataset I used for last week’s post on Rank vs. Tenure, I plotted the following:
- Contributor Rank vs. Portfolio Size
- Average Portfolio Size by Contributor Rank
My goal here was to study the relationship of portfolio size & performance.
Chart 1: Top 2000 Contributors: Rank vs. Portfolio Size
- The average for the entire set was 1,580 files, and the median was 1,067. The spread between these two numbers means that most people have less the mean, but those with very large portfolios are dragging up the average.
- The smallest portfolio in the Top 100 contained 233 images.
- The largest portfolio in the Bottom 100 contained 4,350 images.
Chart 2: Top 500 Contributors – Average Portfolio Size by Rank
- There is a clear break between the top 100 contributors average portfolio sizes and the rest.
- The middle of the range (101-400) are relatively uniform.
Conclusions:
- More images online is correlated with higher rank, but it’s a weaker relationship than I expected — quality plays a major role too.
- Productivity counts — The Top 100 Contributors add 724 files per year, over double that of contributors ranked 400-500, who add 333 files per year.
NB: We can only talk about correlation. You can’t say that if you add 700+ images per year, you’ll be in the Top 100.
Methodology:
I got public data from iStockcharts for the Top 2000 contributors, ranked by Total Downloads. I then plotted the following:
- Rank vs. Years contributing of the Top 2000
- Average & Min Years contributing for the Top 1000
- Histogram of Years Contributing for the Top 200
My goal was to examine tenure vs. performance to see if the number of years you had been at iStock made a difference.
Chart 1: Top 2000 Contributors: Rank vs. Years Contributing
- The average for the entire set was 5.4 years.
- The newest member of the Top 200 had been contributing for less than 3 years.
- The entire set was in the range of 1.5 – 9.0 years.
Chart 2: Top 1000 Contributors — Average & Min Years Contributing
- The most notable thing here is how little variation there is — for the most part, there is no difference in experience between those ranked 1-200 and those ranked 800-1000. I think this is amazing.
Chart 3: Top 200 Contributors by Years Contributing
- 48.5% (97/200) contributors had between 4-6 years of experience.
Conclusions
- I didn’t expect to find this, but there is very little correlation between your iStock performance and your years of experience at iStock.
- The R-squared coefficient is 0.03. It’s range is between 0 (no correlation) and 1 (perfectly correlated).
- Chart 1′s distribution is very uniform for each ranking band.
- No difference in avg & min years contributing for the Top 1000.
- It takes about 2 years to build up a portfolio large enough to break into the Top 2000 at iStock.
- After that, quality and consistency in uploading is what counts.
Methodology:
I conducted searches for the keyword ‘vacation’ and each continent, on iStock. I summed the downloads for the first 100 Best Match results for each one. If you’re interested, you can check out the searches yourself: Australia, Africa, Europe, Asia, Antarctica, South America, and North America.
Results:
Points to Note:
- Australia accounts for 30% of the total DLs for the seven continents.
- I was very surprised by the low DLs for North America. It may be because people don’t search for ‘North America’ but rather search for ‘USA’ or ‘Canada’ (more to come on this one.)
- Editorial is live but sparse — 13 out of 700 items were editorial images (all in North America, South America, & Antarctica.)
Methodology:
I ran the searches below on iStock and summed the downloads of the top 200 Best Match results for each one:
Results:
Points to Note:
- 45% of the Total Downloads in this set of searches were generated by Valentine’s Day AND Roses.
- Valentine’s Day AND Roses generated more cumulative downloads than just Valentine’s Day.
- Jewelry and Chocolate are tiny niches compared to roses.
To see how images were slotted in iStock’s Best Match search results, I divided 2,100 results into two groups:
- New Images: Images with 0-1,000 DLs
- Proven Images: Images with 1000-10,000+ DLs
New vs. Proven Images by Search Position
The chart below shows the number of new vs. proven images for the first 25 positions.
Points to Note:
- For popular searches (business, medical, lifestyle), the top positions are reserved for images with staying power.
- iStock is dedicating half of the first page to New images (assuming 10 images per row on a typical screen.)
- 80.9% of the first 5 search results were Proven images even though they only made up 40.8% of the total results.
- Digging deeper, there are no images with less than 100 DLs in the first five search positions.