LookStat – Official Blog

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.

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.

As part of my analysis of seasonal trends, I looked at LookStat’s 2008 data for images tagged with ‘Easter’ as a keyword. In addition, I did some quick search keyword analysis to see if there were any useful pieces of data.

2008 Royalties for Images Tagged with ‘Easter’

Easter was on March 23, 2008 in the USA. As you can see from the chart above, the 7-day moving average crosses the daily mean about two months before the holiday itself. In this case, January 5. The peak of the curve is one week before the holiday on March 16. This is very similar to the patterns I saw in the Thanksgiving data.

Easter Eggs are 3 time More Popular Than the Easter Bunny

The Google Trends data for Easter shows an identical pattern to the microstock earnings data shown above. One very interesting nugget that jumped out was in the search keywords. There are 3x as many searches for Easter eggs as there are for the Easter Bunny. I’m not sure why this was surprising to me but i had expected the Bunny to fare a little better.

Conclusion

Easter will be on Sunday, April 4, 2010 in the USA. There’s still time to get your Easter images online before the sales really start to ramp in January/late Feb. Also, don’t forget to decorate and shoot those Easter Eggs!

One of the things that interests me around seasonal holidays is the timing of changes in sales velocity of microstock images associated with those holidays. The goal is to identify when to shoot & upload images in order to benefit the most from the seasonal spikes in interest.

The chart below shows a 7-day moving average of the royalties for images with the keyword ‘thanksgiving’ in 2008 and it also overlays the daily mean for those images on the same chart.

2008 Royalties for Images Tagged with ‘Thanksgiving’

The royalties crossed the daily average for the year on August 22, peaked on November 23rd and then dropped off from there. The total volume of royalties between August 22 & November 28 accounted for over 63% of the year’s total. You had to be in early to maximize your benefit, but it would have been worthwhile to continue submitting images throughout September & October.

It seems reasonable to see sales start to climb three months before the holiday itself, but it was interesting to see them peak so close to the actual date of Thanksgiving, which was November 27, 2008 in the USA. I’m speculating here but, the early start would seem to coincide with the print & retail calendars and the continued strength suggests more online uses as we got closer to the holiday itself.

(As an aside, it may make sense to buy props and shoot immediately after a holiday when prices are low and your outdoor shots will still look season appropriate. I’m sure some of you out there are already doing exactly this.)

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this if you get a chance. What has your experience been with seasonal images?

We did an analysis of  2008 data for images with the keyword ‘cat’ vs. ‘dog’ to see how they did overall. It doesn’t matter what metric you look at, it’s not even close – dogs rule!

Image Volume

There were twice as many images tagged with the keyword ‘dog’ as opposed to ‘cat’ in our system. This is interesting when you consider that according to the American Vetinerary Medical Association, cats outnumbered dogs in the USA in 2007 (81 million cats vs. 72 million dogs.)

Royalties per Image

In addition to there being more images of dogs, they also earned more per image and were downloaded more frequently. Royalties earned per image for dog images were twice those earned by cat images.

Images of dogs also had 30% more downloads per image than those of cats.

Total Earnings

This translates to dogs earning over 4x more than cats in 2008.

I’m confident that dog-lovers everywhere knew that their beloved pets would come out ahead, but it’s nice to see it in the data. Let me know your thoughts and whether you see similar things in your portfolios. Also, if you’re interested in specific keywords, let us know in the comments and we’ll see what we can do.

(Full Disclosure: I am a dog owner, but since Casey has a cat at home, we are a pet-neutral company.)

The system is now tracking IS extended license sales. The system will correctly record these sales from this point forward. We will be rolling out fixes that will update historical EL sales over the next few weeks.

Happy New Year everybody. I hope you had a great time, are sufficiently recovered and that you have a fantastic 2009. There are some great LookStat mentions around the web as some of our users are using screenshots to display their earnings. Thanks for all your support and feedback and for talking about the site. Much appreciated. If you are interested in microstock, all these blogs should be on your subscription list.

• jrtb.com: December Stock Results
• Microstock Experiment: December 2008 Earnings
• PDTNC: December Microstock Results

While we love hearing good things, it’s especially great to hear about areas where we could be doing more to make LookStat more useful for our users. Some of the items that have come up over and over again are:

• More Sites (Fotolia is next)
• Sales History for a Particular Image
• Ability to Define a Date Range over Which to View Sales Data

We’re working on all of the items above and you should start to see evidence of this on the site very soon. Please drop me a line anytime if you have ideas or questions. I love engaging directly with current and prospective users.

Thanks again for all the support and may 2009 bring you great pictures and massive earnings!

Last week we released some major updates to our data acquisition systems and also a couple of new user facing features on the site. The behind the scenes changes generally boost the stability and speed of account initialization and ongoing data collection. This should mean fewer site slowdowns when new users sign up.

Also, thanks to some user feedback, we tweaked our charts slightly to add tooltips on hover and more logical presentation of results when you drill down into the earnings view for a particular site. We also added the ability to change the stored login credentials and your LookStat password. This way, if you’re changing your passwords as part of your regular security regimen, you can update them on LookStat and the system won’t miss a beat.

Thank you to all our users for your support and feedback. We’re working hard to make the system more and more useful to you. Please keep your feedback and suggestions coming.