LookStat – Microstock Analytics

Summer is just around the corner, from a shoot planning perspective.

Since the time to begin uploading seasonal images seems to be 2-3 months ahead of an event (see our Thanksgiving & Easter posts) and shoots need to happen well before that, we will be profiling the top leisure activities in the USA early. Similar to our hunting post, I’ll be looking at search trends and highlighting the best-selling stock images associated with those activities.

When deciding to post a list of the top activities, the metric you choose to rank on is important. I’ve included the fastest growing as well as those with the highest number of participants in this post. (We looked at the top activities based on consumer spending last week.)

Fastest Growing Leisure Activities in the USA

The chart below shows the ten fastest growing leisure activities in the USA, measured by the % increase in participation from 2007 to 2008 (2009 data is not yet available.) These data are from the National Sporting Goods Association.

Since growth rates by themselves aren’t meaningful, I’ve included a data table which lists the number of participants and the number added from 2007 to 2008. The data are ranked by growth rate and the top activities in terms of participation are highlighted in bold.

• Running didn’t surprise me much since it’s so easy to get started.
• I was a little surprised by the popularity of ‘exercising with equipment’ especially as it is not the same as ‘working out at a club/gym’ as you can see from the table below.
• Snowboarding grew a lot, but off a small base.
• Even though baseball may be ‘America’s pastime,’ soccer had more participants.
• Yoga was bigger and grew faster than baseball or soccer.

Top 10 Leisure Activities Based on Number of Participants in 2008

• I didn’t expect bowling or fishing to be that high on the list (probably my own biases at work.)
• I think age segmentation will be important. For example, I expect the participation in walking to skew older. (I’ll try and address this aspect in the individual sport profiles.)

Stay Tuned (And Share What You’re Interested In)

Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing activity profiles regularly. I’ll be focusing on the fastest-growing list but will leave out winter sports for now since they won’t be of much use from a shoot planning perspective. (If you’d like to see them anyway, let me know.)

As always, if there’s a specific topic you’d like to see covered, please let me know and I’ll see if we can work it in.

After my surprising discovery that hunting was the sport with the highest per participant spend in the USA, I decided that a quick snapshot of the activity and the search results for ‘hunting’ on stock photography and image websites was in order.

Google Insights for ‘Hunting’

To get a sense for seasonality, I checked Google Insights for Search for hunting search trends from 2008 to the present.

There’s a clear seasonal trend that starts in July and peaks in November. From a stock perspective, 2-3 months is the lead time so April/May is when you want to be uploading hunting related images.

Global Monthly Search Volume (in Millions) for ‘Hunting’ via the Adwords Query Tool

As you can see from the chart above, ‘deer hunting’ as a group of two terms (hunting deer & deer hunting) accounts for 2 million monthly searches. Taken together, these two terms are almost three times larger than the search term immediately below them. It’s also instructive to look at the related keywords.

Global Monthly Volume (in Millions) – Related Keywords (via Adwords Query Tool)

It’s useful to look at not just the term itself, but also related terms:

Clearly, ‘rifles’ and ‘outdoors’ are where the action is. One point to note – given that ‘rifle’ is so much more prevalent than ‘rifles’ you may want to consider using the singular form in your title and description. This is because of the fact that those two IPTC fields become the Page Title which is important for SEO.

Show me the Searches

I decided to search a handful of stock photo sites and order the results by downloads (where possible) to see what turned up.

iStockphoto search for ‘hunting’

Fotolia Search for ‘Hunting’

Dreamstime Search for ‘Hunting’

I found it fascinating that both Dreamstime & Fotolia had business shots in their top search results. The keywords in question were related to ‘job hunting.’ I checked a couple of other USA based sites and they all had recreational hunting related imagery on their top search results. I would guess that this is a reflection of a cultural difference. Another interesting thing is that the most download image from Fotolia & Dreamstime is the same one (but almost 6 times as many downloads on Fotolia than on Dreamstime.)

Conclusions & Impact on Stock Shoots

• Hunting, outdoors, rifles, deer – these are your top terms in the USA (for your title & description, ‘rifle’ may be better than ‘rifles’)
• The growth in search volume begins in June. As a result, you should start uploading in March/April
• Don’t fixate on the meaning of a term that’s most familiar or you might miss other interpretations e.g. ‘house-hunting’ or ‘job-hunting.’

I’m planning a series of posts on summer sports and activities (and related keywords etc) to help with your shoot planning.

While doing some background research I came across a couple of very interesting data repositories at the Census & The National Association of Sporting Goods Manufacturers.

I was playing around with the data for consumer spending and participation and decided to run a quick analysis on the average spending per participant for each of the Top 5. The data blew me away.

Top 5 Recreational Pursuits by Spending

NB: Spending & Participation Data in Millions; Source: NSGA

The Fastest Growing of the Top 5? Hunting…

Source: NSGA

Things That Surprised Me

To be honest, almost everything about the data above surprised me. I expected golf to top the total and per person spending charts and I definitely didn’t expect hunting to be on this chart in the first place.

Based on my surprise around hunting & golf, I decided to do a quick search on iStock & Getty Images to see how many results showed up for stock imagery around these subjects. I expected more golf than hunting shots all around.

At iStock, there were 16,576 images returned for a search for ‘golf’ and 6,806 images returned for a search on ‘hunting’. So far so good. I expected to see the same thing at Getty but it was not to be. Getty returns 10,291 results for golf and 12,990 results for hunting. I’m not really sure how to explain the fact that there are more hunting images at Getty but if you have some ideas, please share them in the comments.

Conclusions & Observations

I’m going to have to add hunting to the list of activities that I profile over the next few weeks!

If you believe that how much someone is willing to spend on something is a proxy for how much a marketer will spend to sell them that something, then hunting is clearly an important activity to study.

A Small Request

If you’ve read this far and you found this post interesting, please tweet about it, follow us on twitter, or leave a comment on our blog. In return, I will contact you to get your vote on which activities you’d like to see us profile in our sports/leisure series.

If you help us share our content, the least we can do is make sure we listen when figuring out what to write about next. (Of course, if you just write to me, I will listen anyway, but that is neither here nor there.)

Thanks for reading this far.

Last week I wrote about total earnings and downloads and the trends associated with pricing, downloads and earnings. In this post, I looked at the same data and adjusted for active users in that year to get an average per user for the year in question. The results are shown below (the earnings per download line is carried over from last week.)

User-adjusted Earnings and Downloads 2002-2009

Key Takeaways

• Declining downloads per user after 2007
• Slowing growth in earnings per user
• Increasing earnings per download

Although earnings per user have continued to rise, the downloads per user peaked in 2007 and have since declined about 20% from 2007 to 2009. These data support some of the things I heard at PDN and UGCX about flat downloads and increased earnings driven by price increases.

Increasing Competition & Higher Standards

As more contributors enter microstock, especially in a down economy when people are looking for other sources of income, there has been an increasing sense  that it is harder than ever to make money in microstock. If you layer on tougher acceptance standards, you can make a case that new contributors will have a tougher time establishing themselves in the market. This then suggests lower downloads and lower earnings per contributor

Competition isn’t the Whole Story

Increased competition and tougher standards only account for part of what is happening. I think there is no question that new contributors and images are entering the market at increasing rates. If the growth of new users exceeds the growth of the overall downloads, then we’ll see a decline in the per user averages. If increasing competition was the only factor however, we would also expect to see a decline in earnings per user. Clearly, this is not the case. Also, one thing that isn’t clear here is if competition is actually hurting established players or whether new entrants are just struggling without creating an impact on existing users. (A cohort analysis could help illuminate this but that is a post for another day.)

On Average, Users Are Earning More

Price increases by the agencies and increased pricing of individual images as they begin selling more are factors driving up user earnings. As contributors gain experience and their images sell, they benefit from increased pricing for their images as well as better placement in search results. There is a little survivor bias at work – you only stick around if you’re seeing success. It is interesting that this effect is more than compensating for the reduction due to competition, market factors etc.

Conclusions

It is harder to break in to microstock and succeed but there is no question that the market has grown overall, through difficult times. While there are many new entrants and standards are rising, increasing earnings per user suggest there is still opportunity in the market.

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts and interpretation in the comments.

Happy New Year everyone! We’ve been crunching through millions of microstock transactions and over the next few weeks will be sharing some of our findings. Here is an annual summary of earnings, downloads and earnings per download from 2002 to 2009.

Earnings and Downloads from 2002 – 2009

I think some of the key takeaways from this chart are:

• Strong growth in total earnings and downloads overall
• Rapid expansion in Earnings per Download
• Significantly slower rate of growth in Downloads from 2008-2009
• I can’t wait to see what will happen in 2010!

Your opinion of microstock will determine how you interpret this data. On the one hand, it is true that the heady growth rates of the early years are no longer present today. On the other hand, this is somewhat normal and expected as an industry expands. Also, from a business perspective, the fact that you can raise prices and move more units, especially during a downturn, is very impressive. Regardless of your point of view, 2010 is going to be a fascinating year.

I’d love to hear your perspectives and predictions in the comments. We’ll be diving into more data shortly, so stay tuned.

Business images are some of the best sellers in microstock and it is a competitive category. I plotted 2008 earnings data for images tagged with ‘business’ and also looked into Google Image search trends for the terms ‘business man’ , ‘business people’ and ‘business woman’ in 2008. The results are charted below.

2008 Royalties for Microstock Images Tagged with ‘business’

Apart from the Christmas holidays, sales of business images are strong throughout the year and rise from September to November. I hadn’t expected to see any real variation throughout the year so found this curve shape to be interesting.

I decided to look at Google Image search data for business man, business woman and business people since the generic data for ‘business’ ranked these terms highly in the related searches

2008 Google Image Search Data for ‘Business’

2008 Google Image Data for ‘Business Man’, ‘Business People’ and ‘Business Woman’

There does appear to be a lull in the summer and a drop off at Christmas. It isn’t as pronounced as the microstock data, however. I found it interesting that ‘business people’ was more common than ‘business woman.’ This has remained true in the 2009 data but the gap between the three terms has closed.

Business Man

Business People

Business Woman

Some Observations

Business images are a competitive category and as Lee has stated in his long tail post - if you’re going to compete in it, you will be competing on quality. Some observations that may help:

• Business images sell well all year round. No real surprise here.
• Suits rule! One thing that is new in 2009 is that ‘business casual’ made the top 10 list of image searches for ‘business.’ Will be interesting to see if that continues
• Keywords I would pay attention to: ‘happy, working, professional, suit, talking, black, meeting, black, old, suit, casual.’
• I found it interesting that ‘business card’ and ‘business cards’ were the top two searches for ‘business’ on Google Images.
• ‘black’ was the only ethnic modifier in the top 10. I would have expected to see ‘hispanic’ as well. By the way, the top result on Google image search for ‘black business woman’ is a Fotolia image. The only other microstock site in the top 12 is istock. It should be no surprise that the image on Fotolia is in their Infinite Collection.

Jonathan Ross has been one of our earliest LookStat users on analytics and was one of our earliest customers on our Back Office services. He has been a pleasure to work with and is always generous with his insight and experience.

RM, RF, Microstock, Video, you name it, Jonathan does it. He’s has been an advocate of operating at every level of the stock industry and we’ve been fortunate to work with him on his microstock endeavors. You can find Jonathan on Twitter – he’s @jonathanjross – follow him. you won’t regret it.

Thanks for the unwavering support Jonathan. We’re excited to be working with you!

Ellen has shared some great insight in her comment which was non-obvious to me. I’ve updated the end of the post to include her thoughts.

Given that it’s (American) football season, I decided to take a look at microstock earnings stats for ‘football’ and also decided to look at the stats for ‘soccer’ while I was at it.

2008 Microstock Earnings Data for ‘football’ vs ‘soccer’ by Month

The two lines track very closely until the summer when you start to see the line for ‘football’ show an increase. This isn’t surprising since every image tagged with ‘soccer’ is probably also tagged with ‘football’. Thus, to a rough degree, you’d expect solid overlap until the American Football season in the USA starts up in the summer.

I decided to compare this with data from Google Insights for search for the same search terms and limit the results to Image Search Data for 2008 in the USA.

As you can see, the form of the curves is quite similar to the microstock sales data in the prior chart. I expect there to be more congruence between the two charts over time as microstock sites improve their SEO. One point to keep in mind is that the US data is the only level at which you see this curve shape. Soccer is a much more popular sport when viewed at a global level.

Microstock Implications (Updated  with Ellen Boughn’s terrific comment)

There can be no question that globally, soccer is a much more popular game than American football. However, there is a discernible bump associated with the American football season in the United States. While it’s a small fraction of the total sales for the ‘football’ category of images, it is not insignificant and probably worth adding to your portfolio.

Via Ellen Boughn (who is awesome!) – Follow her: @ellenboughn on Twitter

Globally soccer is more popular, but globally America has the largest percentage of any country of stock photo buyers…distorting the need for football pics over soccer. Yet the most popular sport in the US…with respect to the number of people involved…is kid’s soccer. So shoot US football that can pass as pro or college and kids 13 and younger playing soccer. I should also mention that girl’s soccer is really important.

Steve Gibson (@microstockin on Twitter) at Microstock Insider has a couple of great posts up that are well worth your time. The first is a post about popular search keywords and the second, from last year, is about seasonal stock images.

Lots of good data and exploration of the relationship between popular searches/data on Google vs. search data from a free stock site that Steve has access to. He concludes that the correlation is quite high, but there are likely to be situations where the two diverge. I think this is absolutely true. Not every search query makes sense on microstock.

Having said, that, I think it’s important to remember that just because a topic isn’t well covered already, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t demand for it. The beauty of microstock is that it is possible to test the waters by shooting some more experimental concepts and examining the results in views and sales. PicNiche can also help you figure this out.

In general, if people are looking for something, there’s a high likelihood that marketers will try and advertise it to them. (Of course, you have to figure out where in the long tail you are operating to figure out how much to invest in that image.)

Environmental themes are common in microstock and I thought it would be helpful to share the top search keywords associated with ‘energy’ to aid in planning and keywording energy related microstock concepts.

Top Search Keywords (via Google Adwords Query Tool)

The big takeaways here are is that ‘solar energy’ is searched for twice as often as ‘wind energy.’ I also initially found ‘jobs’ surprising. With hindsight, it makes current sense given the current economic climate and that concept might be worth exploring as part of a shoot.

Google Insights Trends

I plotted 2008 data to get a sense for full-year seasonality and apart from a steady rise from Jan to April, there doesn’t appear to be a significant seasonality barring a decline from November to Jan which is likely due to Thanksgiving & Christmas.

While drilling into solar energy a little more, I found the regional data interesting as well. The top five regions are Nigeria, Pakistan, India & South Africa from a search volume perspective.

Implications for Microstock

Given the above data, it’s clear that solar should be at the top of your concept list and given the regional trends, varying the ethnicity of your models is probably worthwhile as well.