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According to the Society of American Florists (SAF), Christmas/Hannukah is the top holiday for flower sales in the USA.

These stats surprised me, because I think of Valentine’s Day & Mother’s Day as the primary flower-buying occasions.

The SAF’s data show that centerpieces and red poinsettia purchases are the primary drivers of holiday flower sales. You can read more at the SAF’s site, AboutFlowers.com

Pay attention to these details when planning your microstock shoots so you have the right props and subjects available. (You do plan your shoots don’t you?)

Rasmus Rasmussen, an experienced iStock inspector (among other things), has a great post on his blog called “10 Subjects to Water Down Any Portfolio.” His biggest pet peeve is listed below:

1. Bugs on Flowers

Congratulations on your macro lens. At least I hope you used a macro lens, so you could get somewhat close. Bugs on flowers is my personal pet peeve subject. Sure, flowers are pretty and bugs are interesting creatures, but as a photo it just doesn’t do it for me. Most of the time, it comes out looking like you were just practicing and like the gazillion existing images just like it.

For the remaining nine, read the full post at his blog.

As we mentioned when we announced our analytics upgrade, we would be moving to a free + subscription model. We are making that transition today.

We are rolling out the ability to upgrade to paid functionality and we are offering significant discounts for users who were using LookStat before June 2, 2010. You’ll see the upgrade button when you log in at the top right of the page.

Key Points to Note:

• Everyone who is not on a paid plan will always have access to the free functionality.
• Initially, all users will be set to free. You can upgrade at any time by logging in and clicking on the upgrade link.
• If you have more collections than we’re permitting in the free plan, you’ll be able to keep them and they will continue to be updated. We will not take away any existing collections.
• There are significant discounts for upgrading by June 30th (and even more if you pre-pay for a year.)
• We have a 30 day free trial on all plans before you’ll be charged.
• You can cancel at any time but we do not offer refunds.

Why You Should Upgrade Right Away:

• 33% discount across the board if you upgrade by June 30th (this means annual plans are 44% off full-price monthly rates!)
• Full access to existing and new features.
• First access to new sites as we add them to the system.
• Private consultation & custom analysis.
• Helps keep our service alive.

We’re committed to creating software and services for contributors and we need to charge in order to continue to keep things running and evolving. Thanks for your support to-date and here’s to a successful 2010 (and beyond) for all of us!

Cheers,

Casey & Rahul

We’ve upgraded our LookStat Analytics service for all users. You don’t need to take any action. Most people should see the new site within an hour.

What do you have to do?
1. Nothing but we’d like you to try out the new site and send us feedback.

What does this mean?
1. Everyone gets the new LookStat Analytics service.
2. We will be going to freemium (free or subscription) model this week; For the next few days everyone will get to try out the premium service for free.
3. Existing users will get an opportunity to upgrade at a discount.

Where can I learn more?
1. Read our blog post on our new plans and pricing.
2. Read our blog post on the stats available to you.

Will provide more information here and in site shortly.

-Casey and Rahul

‘Happy Care’ – smiling medical professionals and reassured patients – is the most common theme for medical microstock images. They were described perfectly in a comment from the last post on medical image formats and I’m including that here for reference:

“Happy Care” all the way, doctors need to appear warm, friendly, in control yet prepared to come down to the level of the patient and reassure them that everything is going to be alright. No one wants a Christina from Grey’s Anatomy. If only all Docs were Stock Docs!

– Neustock Images

Dominant Themes in Top 60 Medical Microstock Images (Top 20 from IS, DT, FT)

The data above are sorted according to number of images.

Points to Note:

• Happy Care Images are the most common theme in the Top 60 images and account for 35% of the images and over 40% of the downloads. They outperform the averages on all metrics being tracked.
• The ‘Stethoscope’ is the second most common theme and it is typically a medical still-life concept.

Medical Team – Strong Performer (Beware Small Sample Size)

While I would be wary of drawing conclusions from small sample sizes (anything with less than 5 images is a little suspect) the performance of the ‘Team’ concept was somewhat surprising. These are images of just medical professionals like the one below:

A quick TinEye search shows the image in use at a variety of healthcare services websites and sites like the American Institute of Healthcare Professionals.

Conclusions

• Happy Care is the dominant theme (and from our prior post, horizontal formats rule)
• Still life is a viable category for medical images
• There appear to be two conceptual arcs for medical imagery – one is imagery focused at patients (e.g. Happy Care) and the other is imagery focused on reaching medical professionals (e.g. healthcare services, healthcare technology.) For some reason, this wasn’t top of mind but it makes perfect sense.

We recently looked at the relationship between image format & views and downloads for Active Seniors. We’re continuing this sort of analysis across major image categories and our next series of posts will be on the top 60 medical images (Top 20 at istock, Dreamstime & Fotolia.)

Orientation vs. Views/Downloads/Conversion

Points to Note:

• Horizontal images continue to outperform the average (also true for active seniors)
• Square images have the highest views per image and perform only slightly worse than the horizontal from a downloads per image perspective
• Vertical images continue to under-perform the set average (also true for active seniors)

PS: The concept in the image above, which we’re calling ‘Happy Care’ (smiling, competent professionals & happy, relaxed patients) is by far the most popular medical theme. More stats on this in posts to come.

I decided to analyze the orientation of the Top 60 images from the Active Seniors searches that I’ve been writing about and the results of that analysis are in the table below:

Key Points

• Horizontal images are the most numerous & best performing, on all metrics – conversion (dls/views), views per image and downloads per image.
• No square images in the top-sellers, in spite of the notion that square thumbnails do better.
• You are leaving money on the table if you don’t shoot horizontal and vertical formats

This isn’t really all that surprising. When we last analyzed the impact of shooting horizontal vs. vertical vs. square across millions of transactions, we came to the same conclusion – Revenue per image for Horizontal shots was twice that of other formats. Our reasoning was that as usage shifted online & microstock is purchased for online uses, horizontal image formats work best.

Are you using LookStat collections to see these trends in your sales? What are you seeing?