LookStat – Microstock Analytics

About This Post

This is the second post in a two part series on Cycling. The first post covered search and demographic trends and this post focuses on stock photography trends related to this topic.

Stock Photography Trends for ‘Cycling’

I decided to search for ‘cycling’ as opposed to ‘bicycle’ to search for images about the activity rather than actual images of bicycles. Also, since ‘cycling’ was the top keyword identified in the search trends, this seemed like a valid approach.

Number of Stock Image Results

I find it fascinating that Getty has more results than most of the microstock sites and that Fotolia and Dreamstime are so far behind iStock & Shutterstock in terms of image count. Links to the default searches from each site are listed below:

• Corbis
• Dreamstime
• Fotolia
• Getty
• iStockphoto
• Shutterstock

Best Selling Images

I did a search for ‘cycling’ on istock and sorted the list by downloads. As the screenshot below shows, four of the top five images are of recreational cycling involving mountain bikes. This lines up well with the reasons why people ride (73% recreation) and most popular bike types (28.5% mountain bikes) highlighted in the first post. The top two images (with over 9,300 combined downloads) belong to Monkey Business Images. These images combine a popular activity – recreational cycling, with a popular demographic – active seniors. It’s rare to see images from non-exclusive contributors in the top echelons of iStock downloads so kudos are definitely due to Monkey Business.

Paying Attention to Details

Another interesting thing that popped up was the fact that not all images with ‘cycling’ had the keyword ‘bicycle’ in them. If you search for ‘cycling’ and NOT ‘bicycle’ on the sites above, you’ll see that 15-25% of the images have ‘cycling’ but not bicycle. This is a big missed opportunity since ‘bicycle’ is the number two search term in this area. While I can appreciate that not every image of a bicycle involves the activity of cycling, I’m fairly confident that the vast majority of images of people cycling involve bicycles.

For example, searching for images of cycling that exclude bicycles, motorcycles, unicycles etc, returns 2000+ results on istock. You can see from the screenshot below that bicycle would have been a relevant term.

Conclusions

• Pay attention to your keywords
• Recreation, lifestyle and mountain bikes are where the volume is
• All age groups are relevant when it comes to recreational cycling

Conclusions from Part 1 (for Reference)

• Most americans cycle for recreation & fitness – make sure these concepts are featured in both your images & your keywords
• The fact that cycling is popular with kids and mid-age adults and that its primarily about recreation suggests that cycling is a popular family activity and this is a concept worth exploring for lifestyle shoots.
• The most popular bike type worldwide is the mountain bike, by almost 2:1. This doesn’t mean that road bikes are not important, but if you’re shooting cycling it’s important to be aware of the relative popularity.
• Cycling as a term is closely tied to the sport, but it should be part of your image keywords anyway
• If you’re shooting racing & roadies, then make sure you get your images online before the Tour! From a stock image perspective, 2-3 months before the event is the time to upload
• It’s important to use different variations when keywording your images for stock & SEO. This is somewhat moot for iStock exclusives given the CV, but still important for Titles & Descriptions given their importance to SEO

Bicycle riding was number 5 on our list of fastest growing leisure activities and was ranked number 6 in terms of total participants. This post, which will be part of a two part series focuses on:

• Demographic Trends
• Search Trends
• Top Search Keywords

The second post will focus on stock photography trends and data and will link back to this one.

2007 Participation by Gender

Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States

2007 Participation by Age

Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States

As you can see from the above data, cycling is evenly balanced across gender and generally skews lower in terms of participation by age (76% of participants are 44 or younger).

Best Selling Bike Types (from our earlier post: Cycling – Interesting Industry Stats)

Why People Ride (from our earlier post: Cycling – Interesting Industry Stats)

The major conclusions from the demographic data are:

• Cycling is evenly balanced across genders and skews younger
• Mountain-bike styled bikes (including the hybrid category) are the most common type of bike sold
• Youth bikes are important and the 7-11 age group is the largest single participant category
• The vast majority of people cycle for recreation first and fitness second
• Based on the local maxima in the age chart at the low end and in the middle, I would guess that families cycling together is a viable shoot concept

Search Trends

Pinning down search trends isn’t easy because some of the terms have very specific meanings. For example, a search for cycling skews heavily towards the sport of cycling and the keywords around it are focused on racing while searches for ‘bicycle’ tend of focus on bike and bike parts purchasing. In this section, I’m going to show a composite chart to give you a sense for relative search volumes and trends.

As you can see from the screenshot of Google Insights Data for ‘bicycle’, ‘cycling’ & ‘bike riding’, There’s a steady seasonal climb in interest from January to July and a fairly symmetric decline from July through the end of the year. The red line in the chart above is the search trends for ‘cycling’ and it peaks in the first week of July after being generally flat throughout the year. This coincides perfectly with the Tour de France. Although the scale dampens the effect slightly, there is a 50% increase in searches related to ‘cycling’ in the peak week when compared to the week immediately before it.

I also decided to take a look at searches for road bikes vs. mountain bikes to cross-check the demographic data and the results are entirely consistent. In the USA, mountain bikes are searched for 1.7x more often than road bikes are and this is virtually identical to the data from the National Bicycle Dealers Association. (Also, this isn’t just a US phenomenon – the results are the same when looking at worldwide search trends.)

Top Search Keywords

As I mentioned above, it can be challenging to identify the best keywords across all types of bicycle related shoots since they are so different. To get some sense of aggregate importance, I put in a range of terms and then sorted the results from the adwords keyword tool by search volume. The top 20 results are in the table below:

Conclusions

• Most americans cycle for recreation & fitness – make sure these concepts are featured in both your images & your keywords
• The fact that cycling is popular with kids and mid-age adults and that its primarily about recreation suggests that cycling is a popular family activity and this is a concept worth exploring for lifestyle shoots.
• The most popular bike type worldwide is the mountain bike, by almost 2:1. This doesn’t mean that road bikes are not important, but if you’re shooting cycling it’s important to be aware of the relative popularity.
• Cycling as a term is closely tied to the sport, but it should be part of your image keywords anyway
• If you’re shooting racing & roadies, then make sure you get your images online before the Tour! From a stock image perspective, 2-3 months before the event is the time to upload
• It’s important to use different variations when keywording your images for stock & SEO. This is somewhat moot for iStock exclusives given the CV, but still important for Titles & Descriptions given their importance to SEO

I’ll be covering cycling in more detail in a couple of weeks but I came across some interesting stats that are worth sharing.

Share of Units Sold by Type

Source: National Bicycle Dealers Association (NBDA)

As you can clearly see from the chart above, mountain bikes were the single largest category of bicycles sold by specialty bike stores in 2008. In addition, the comfort & hybrid classes can be thought of as less aggressive mountain bikes. This is worth keeping in mind as you think about stock shoots in this category. Youth cycling is also a large category and should be explored.

Specialty Bicycle Retailers Generate Most of the Dollars

According to the NBDA statistics, specialty bicycle stores account for only 17% of units, but 50% of dollars generated in the industry. They also account for almost all the services & parts revenues. If you’re planning a retail oriented shoot in this category, specialty stores are the way to go.

Why People Ride

Source: National Bicycle Dealers Association (NBDA)

Although the data above are from a 2006 survey of why adults ride, changes are not likely to be major. It’s clear that recreation is the primary reason people ride and that lines up well with the fact that mountain & comfort bikes make up the major portion of bike sales. (Note: the data add up to more than 100% because people ride for more than one reason.)

What About Commuting?

According to the League of Amercian Bicyclists analysis of 2008 Census data, 0.55% of Americans use a bicycle as their primary means of getting to work. Although this represents significant growth from it’s levels in prior years, it’s a tiny fraction of the total. They have published an online spreadsheet ranking cities by % of bicycle commuters – Portland, Minneapolis & Seattle are the top 3 US cities.

Implications for Shoot Planning

• Mountain bikes and comfort bikes are the dominant category of bike sold
• Recreation is the main reason that people ride
• Bicycling commuting in the USA is a tiny portion of the total, even though it is growing.
• Watch those logos! Bicycle frames, components and tires are almost completely covered in logos. I recommend dealing with this on the bike with tape & paint rather than spending days of Photoshop time cleaning things up in post-production.

One point to note is that I expect the picture to be significantly different in Europe where there is a strong road biking tradition and many more people commute by bike.

Upcoming Posts

Future posts on cycling will focus on recreation and will go into demographics & stock photography trends.