LookStat – Official Blog

While doing some research into travel, I came across some data on the cities that were most visited by travelers to the USA from Overseas.

Top US Cities Visited by Overseas Travelers

Source: Statistic Abstract of the USA

Note the data above exclude visitors from Canada & Mexico.) I wasn’t surprised to see NYC at the top of the list, but I was surprised that Los Angeles was the second most visited city. Given the fact that Orlando is ranked in the top 6 as well, I’m guessing that Disney is the main driver of those visits.

The rest of the top 10 in order were:

7. Honolulu, HI
8. Washington DC
9. Chicago, IL
10. Boston, MA

2007 Visitors to the USA by Country of Origin

Source: Department of Homeland Security

The chart above shows visitors to the USA by country of origin. It includes both tourists and business travelers but excludes most short term visitors from Mexico & Canada.

Stock Photography Search Results

I decided to do a quick set of searches to see how many results there were for some of the top cities at a range of sites.

The thing that stands out the most is the massive drop off when it comes to images of Orlando, especially given that there were more visitors total (domestic & international) to Orlando (48.9 Million) than there were to NYC (47 million) in 2008. A quick check of downloads however suggests that there may not be as much demand for Orlando imagery.

Another thing I found surprising was the sheer number of Getty results. As it turns out, they include the location of the shoot in their keywords. This makes no sense to me. If I’m searching for ‘New York City’ I don’t really want a picture of a man taken in a studio in New York, I want something that evokes the city.

iStockphoto Search Results for ‘New York City’

Getty Images Search Results for New York City

Summary

• New York was visited by 8.2 million overseas travelers in 2008; about three times the number who visited the #2 destination which was Los Angeles. It’s also the destination that draws the most dollars from tourists at $30billion. (Source: NYC Go Stats)
• Orlando seems to be radically under-represented from a stock image perspective when you consider total travelers. Granted, most visitors are domestic but presumably they are still being shown images of the city when they make their travel choices. Studying downloads however suggests that people just aren’t licensing as many images – I’m not sure how to explain this but would welcome your thoughts in the comments.

There have been a few mentions of LookStat Back Office services and our new Guide to Microstock for RM & RF Photographers around the web and I’m excited to share them with you.

LookStat Back Office Services – Just Press Play – A review by Tyler Olson on the Microstock Group Blog

The back-end service of Lookstat is a great tool for anyone who likes shooting more than sitting in front of a computer or who doesn’t have a room full of people working for them.

Microstock photography is time intensive.  Shooting and editing in larger numbers, keywording those images, and perhaps most time consuming, uploading to the large number of microstock sites – all add up to a lot of time spent per file.  Time that could have been more productively spent shooting.

For those who take advantage of the Lookstat Back-end service however – all they need to do is shoot, ‘press play’, and watch their images appear on the microstock sites of their choice.  Edited, key-worded, uploaded and processed – ready for sale.

This Month in Microstock: LookStat’s Guide to Microstock for Traditional Stock Photographers – A mention on Microstock Diaries’ news roundup

Helping to demystify much of the misunderstandings of microstock in the traditional market, LookStat released a beautifully designed and free 35-page downloadable PDF guide to microstock for RM and RF Stock Photographers.

February Microstock News – A mention of our guide at Microstock Insider

lookstat published a useful microstock guide, written as an introduction to microstock for RF (macro) and RM photographers. It includes some statistics, advice and checklists that are still useful for microstock photographers who already know the ropes.

Thanks to all the folks above for the kind words!

We have been working hard over the past few weeks on a free 35-page guide for RM & RF stock photographers who are interested in microstock. Microstock is a growing part of the stock photography market and it’s important to stay informed about it, especially in light of the convergence taking place between micro & RF.

The guide provides an overview of what microstock is and how to get started. It also contains profiles of the top sites, details on their application process, and a submission checklist which covers the latest requirements for creating accounts and uploading and submitting images.

We wrote this to answer a lot of the questions we hear about microstock, especially from established stock photographers interested in adding another revenue stream to their portfolios. I hope you’ll find it a useful and helpful reference.

I know a some of you will know most of this information cold, but hopefully you know someone else that would find it useful. Please help me spread the word about this by tweeting about the guide or sharing it on Facebook.

Thank you for your help and support. As always your comments and feedback are greatly appreciated.

Walking for exercise was the most popular activity in terms of number of participants and was in the top ten when it came to year over year growth on our list of top leisure activities. Given an aging population, and a tough economy, it’s not surprising that walking is a popular leisure activity. To provide some context, in 2008, there were 96.6 million people who participated in ‘walking’ compared to ‘golf’ which had 25.5 million participants. Also, the number of walkers in 2008 was 11% higher than it was in 2007 which saw 89.9 million participants.

This will be a two part series. In this post, I’m going to look at:

• Demographic & Gender Trends for Walking in the USA
• Footwear Spending by Category
• Walking Shoe Purchasers by Age & Gender
• Top Search Keywords

The second post will focus on stock photography related to ‘walking’ and will link back to this one.

Participation by Gender

Source: NSGA, Statistical Abstract of the USA

Participation by Age

Source: NSGA, Statistical Abstract of the USA

Walking as a means of exercise clearly skews older (49% of participants 45 or older) and female (62.5% female). This data is also supported by the footwear spending data as you’ll see below.

Footwear Spending by Type of Shoe

Walking shoes accounted for 33% of the $12.5 billion dollars spent on footwear in 2007 (data for 2008 were projected to be similar and 2009 data are not available yet but if anything, I’d expect this to be more pronounced.)

Walking shoe Purchasers by Gender & Age

Digging into the walking shoe purchasers show that the same trends apply as the overall participation in walking. 45-64 is the biggest age group and the percentage of female users is identical to the percentage of female walkers.

Search Trends for Walking & Walking Shoes

The chart below shows data from Google Insights for ‘exercise walking’ and ‘walking shoes’ from 2008 to 2010.

There isn’t much seasonality, but ‘walking shoes’ are searched for 5 times more often than ‘exercise walking.’ This surprised me initially, but intuitively it makes sense that people would be searching for ‘walking shoes’ as opposed to for ‘exercise walking.’ The same caveats as those in our comments on running shoes apply – be careful of trademarked designs & logos.

Top Searches Related to ‘Exercise Walking’

Conclusions

• Walking for exercise is the top leisure activity in the USA in terms of participation with close to 100 million people taking part in 2008!
• Demographically speaking, the participants skew older & female; the top age segment is 45-64 years old.
• Walking shoes represent the top footwear category in the USA and the demographics (not surprisingly) map closely with walkers.
• ‘Walking shoes’ should be part of your keywording strategy since they are a high volume search query
• Top related keywords are: “exercise, weight loss, calories, walking shoes”

I think the demographic trends around walking are fairly clear. This lines up well with general demand for imagery around ‘active seniors’ and this is something I’ll dive into in more detail in the second part of this post. Stay tuned and comments and feedback are always appreciated!

(I knew my Dickens would come in handy at some point.)

As I’ve written about before, microstock and traditional RF stock photography are converging and it’s important for traditional RF stock photographers to test microstock as a channel for their images.

To illustrate this, I decided to license two images. One is from iStock’s Vetta collection and the other is a royalty free image from Getty Images. I think they are both great images and the price points are comparable and that is the point.

Image 1: ‘Elderly Man & Woman on Couch in Nursing Home’ (Getty Images)

I licensed the 506 x 337 px size for $49. The pricing chart for the image is shown below:

One thing to note is that an RF license from Getty is much less restrictive than the base iStock license. There is no limit to the number of print runs from Getty for example. On iStock (as I’ll discuss below) this is not the case.

Image 2: ‘Senior’ (iStockphoto, Vetta Collection)

I licensed the 849 x 565 px sized image for roughly $20 (20 credits.) The pricing chart of this image is shown below:

As I mentioned above, the base license from iStock is much more restrictive in terms of what you can do with it when compared to the RF license from Getty. In order to bring the licenses into parity, you have to add the ‘Unlimited Reproduction’ option shown above. This brings the cost of licensing the image to $320. Essentially, licensing the images for similar purposes at the high end is equivalent in cost. (It’s interesting that the microstock license actually has more usage-based elements built in to it than the traditional RF license)

Conclusions

• Microstock and traditional RF are rapidly converging.
• The images in this post are both terrific and cost roughly the same to license.
• The microstock license has more usage restrictions than the Getty RF license.
• If you have imagery in RF, you should be submitting imagery to microstock.

About This Post

This is the second post in a two-post series about Yoga. The first post focused on general search and demographic trends while this post will focus on the following items:

• Stock Photography Trends
• Snapshot of Search Results from Major Sites
• Best Selling Yoga Concepts on Microstock

Stock Searches for Yoga

We conducted a search for yoga on a range of stock sites and Flickr to get a feel for the number of results.

As you can see Corbis & Getty have roughly 10,000 images for this search term, istock has 14,374 results which the remaining three microstock sites have roughly double the result count of iStock.

Intuitively, this result makes sense since the you would expect Corbis & Getty to have the fewest images and the larger microstock sites to have the most, with iStock somewhere in between. (This is in contrast to the ‘Running’ data where Getty, Istock & Fotolia all had roughly the same number of images.)

Note: Flickr, as usual dominated with over 270,000 results.

Comparison of Search Results for Yoga

We did a quick comparison of the default search results returned when you do a search for ‘yoga’ on all of the sites listed above. Links to all the searches are provided below and a screenshot of the results for iStock & Getty are shown below.

iStock (Best Match – ‘yoga’)

Getty Images (Default search – ‘yoga’)

I find the iStock results more compelling than those on Getty but I’m guessing that image buyers who license images from Getty aren’t doing so from the website. (It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves over time.)

Links to Results from Other sites:

• Corbis
• Dreamstime
• Fotolia
• Shutterstock
• Flickr

Best Selling Stock Images on Microstock

As Ellen Boughn suggested in her comment to part 1 of the Yoga series, there are two main settings for yoga stock photos. Nature and  yoga studios. There is also the ‘business person doing yoga’ theme but that isn’t downloaded as often.

As you can see from the screenshot of most downloaded yoga photos on iStock shown above, outdoor (beach and idyllic nature) yoga images account for fifteen out of the top twenty-eight results (54%).

However, if you add up the downloads (using the lower bound of the range supplied by istock) the nature images account for 22,500 of the 35,300 downloads generated by the 28 images above. This is roughly 64%

If you eliminate the top selling image, which generated 6,300+ downloads, then then nature images account for 56% of the total downloads.

This is too small an edge to be meaningful for a sample of this size. (We’ll look at this more definitively in the future.)

Conclusions from Part 2

• Getty & Corbis have far fewer images for Yoga than the microstock sites do.
• There is an even mix of nature & yoga school/studio images in the best-sellers at iStock.
• There are no images of older people doing yoga which may be an opportunity if you recall from part 1 that over 30% were 45 or older.
• Although ‘bikram/hot yoga’ was popular from a search standpoint, it wasn’t as prevalent in stock results. This may be because sweat doesn’t sell, but it’s probably a concept worth exploring

Conclusions from Part 1 (for reference)

• Yoga searches peak in January.
• Bikram/hot yoga is by far the most searched for form of yoga (15x more popular than the next highest term which was: ‘hatha yoga’.
• ‘Mats’ , ‘fitness’ , ‘classes’ are all in the top 10 in terms of keywords. Don’t ignore them on your images.
• Women outnumber men by roughly 6 to 1 in terms of yoga participation.
• The peak age segment is 25-34, but there are plenty of older (45+ particpants) as well.

About This Post
Yoga was ranked #2 in the data on our fastest growing recreational activities post. I’m breaking this profile into 2 parts for brevity’s sake. This post will cover the following:

• General Search Trends
• Popular Forms of Yoga
• Top Search Keywords
• Demographics of Particpants

Part 2 will cover stock photography search results and trends and will link to this one.

General Search Trends – 2004 – Present; USA

The chart above shows Google Insights for Search data  for ‘yoga’ from 2004 to the present day for the USA. There is a clear upward trend which you can see if you connect the peaks of the chart. In addition, like a lot of fitness-related terms (see our post on ‘weight loss’), there is a peak in January (resolutions anyone?) but a relatively steady volume of interest throughout the year.

Popular Forms of Yoga

The above chart shows Google Insights data for 2009 – Present for some popular forms of yoga. If you consider that Bikram & Hot yoga are thought of as the same thing then Bikram accounts for 84% of the above searches in Jan 2010.

Top 10 Search Keywords

Using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, I ran a quick search on yoga and sorted the results by global monthly search volume. The Top 10 are plotted below:

Participant Demographics

According to the Statistical Abstract  of the United States, there were 10.7 million yoga participants in 2007. In the charts below, the data are broken out by gender & age.

2007 Participation by Gender

As anyone who has ever set foot in a yoga studio will attest to, the data above are not surprising. It would be interesting to track this breakdown over time and see how it is changing.

2007 Participation by Age Group

The peak age group is 25-34 but there is strong participation in the older bands as well. Over 30% of participants were 45 or older.

Conclusions

• Yoga searches peak in January.
• Bikram/hot yoga is by far the most searched for form of yoga (15x more popular than the next highest term which was: ‘hatha yoga’.
• ‘Mats’ , ‘fitness’ , ‘classes’ are all in the top 10 in terms of keywords. Don’t ignore them on your images.
• Women outnumber men by roughly 6 to 1 in terms of yoga participation.
• The peak age segment is 25-34, but there are plenty of older (45+ particpants) as well.

Other Posts in This Series

• Top 10 Recreational Activities
• Top 5 Activities by Consumer Spending
• Activity Profiles
  • Running
  • Hunting
  • Weight Loss

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

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

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.)

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

Dreamstime

Fotolia

Getty

iStockphoto

Shutterstock

Flickr

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.

StockXpert announced on its forum that the site is ceasing operations as of today. The timeline for the wind-down is as follows:

• Feb 2: Uploading & user signup is being suspended; Uploads already in queue will be reviewed until Feb 10.
• Feb 10: Reviewing of Images Stops
• Feb 11: Searching & Downloading of Images Ceases

If you have credits at StockXpert, they will be transferred on a 1 for 1 basis to iStockphoto. Images & footage will not be copied over however. StockXpert will continue to remain live for certain operations and they plan to allow contributors who don’t have iStock accounts to request full payouts. (The post also mentions that contributors will be able to download their portfolios for some period of time.)

This move has been coming since Getty acquired Jupiter. And, as is clear from the screenshot above, Getty will be focusing their resources on iStock & Thinkstock. StockXchng (StockXpert’s free image sister site) will continue operating normally.

One final point of note: StockXpert contributors who opted in to subscriptions will have their images migrated to Thinkstock and they will be visible in the Hemera collection on that site.

The distinction between microstock and royalty free (RF) is becoming irrelevant.

If this seems a little controversial, consider the following:

• Veer announced that it is blending RF & microstock at Veer.com and moving rights managed (RM) imagery to Corbis.
• Getty launched Thinkstock this morning. This is a subscription-only site which integrates imagery from Getty, Jupiter & Istock into one blended set of search results.

Microstock and RF will be blended seamlessly from the buyer’s perspective and image buyers will be given more choice than ever before. Buyers are being presented with images in response to searches and they will buy what works best for them.

Impact on Pricing

What happens to pricing depends on your point of view. I’m optimistic that we’ll start to see pricing get tied to how often images are purchased. This form of pricing is fairly common in microstock today; all images start off at the same level and popular images go up in price. As a result:

• The best performing images earn the most.
• The lower prices of newer images ensures that they don’t get completely buried by the best-sellers. As they sell, they move up the earnings ladder.

If anything similar to this is implemented in the blended sites, prices for popular images will go up whether they began life with the ‘microstock’ or the ‘RF’ label. Conversely, images that don’t sell well will not benefit.

Ultimately, the impact on pricing is likely to be mixed, and your background in stock photography will influence how you feel about pricing. If you started in microstock, the pricing trend has been upwards. If your background is in RM/RF, then ‘upwards’ is probably not the first word that comes to mind.

Still, the market is what it is, and your choices remain the same: do nothing, adapt, or leave. I think there is still opportunity but it won’t involve doing what worked in the past.

What About Rights Managed?

There continues to be a place in the market for RM imagery, but this won’t be limited to traditional agencies. It would be easy for a site like iStock or Fotolia to implement RM licensing across their entire collections. As more traditional image buyers begin to explore self-service online channels for stock photography, it’s inevitable that sites will evolve to accommodate their requirements. This doesn’t mean a decline in pricing – images, that are in demand, unique, and hard to replicate, will always command a premium. The more likely scenario is a continued evolution towards a single stock photography licensing storefront. (Whether that is a million small storefronts integrated by Google or an individual stock photography site remains to be seen.)

Implications for Stock Photographers

• The distinction between microstock and RF is not meaningful.
• Evaluate and test your distribution options (direct, RM, Micro/RF) to find which ones work for you.
• Microstock is now a viable way to get your images in front of RM/RF buyers.

Further Reading

• Ellen Boughn – Where do you fit in Phototown?
• Paul Melcher - The New End
• Fast Media Magazine – Veer Calling Time on RF

A Parting Thought

If Thinkstock updates it’s collection every week, I think the iStock portion of the collection is going to grow the fastest. I think the same will be true at Veer and the images submitted through Veer Marketplace. It’ll be interesting to see how the editing strategies evolve to manage this aspect of their sites.