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?)
‘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.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, couples were the most popular theme for active senior images. I was interested in the setting for the images (indoors vs. outdoors) and decided to analyze the impact on downloads and downloads per image.
I found the difference is very interesting. Even though there are over three times as many pictures of active seniors in outdoor settings vs. indoor settings, the downloads per image are significantly higher. Indoor shots perform 28% better in terms of downloads per image.
The average for all couple shots is 781.3 downloads per image, so indoors are doing better there too. I think it would be worth adding some indoor compositions to your portfolio if you’re shooting active seniors.
Jonathan Ross has been a long time supporter and customer at LookStat and I’m delighted to be able to congratulate him and his network of top notch photographers on the launch of a new RM/RF stock Agency, Spaces Images. The collection is initially available at Corbis.
The collection is focused on images of human environments (interiors, locations etc) that have nobody in them. There are some fantastic shots in the collection and it’s well worth your time to check them out. Jonathan’s long experience in RM/RF helped him discover an opportunity for shots without people in them and he created Spaces to take advantage of it.
LookStat’s Role
We provided a Back Office platform that allowed Jonathan & his contributors to focus on creating the images and shaping the collection while we handled keywording, property releases, metadata, image conversion and distribution. We simplified the submission process for contributors and greatly reduced infrastructure & technology costs for Spaces.
It’s a pleasure working with Jonathan & the team of contributors at Spaces and we’re looking forward to the success and growth of the collection in the days to come.
If you are interested in how our comprehensive Back Office solution can help you, please contact us for more information.
In the Top 60 images (by downloads) of Active Seniors, at Dreamstime, Fotolia & iStock, the most common theme is ‘couples’ – men and women holding hands. I decided to break down the images of couples by setting and the results are below.
Couples in parks account for just under half the number of images of couples but represent 63.5% of the downloads. It’s interesting that even though Parks were the most common setting, they still perform above average for the set. (As an aside, even though ‘home’ & ‘dock’ have extremely high download per image ratios, given that there was only one image in each setting, it’s important to not read too much into those numbers. More data is required.)
One of the factors I looked at when analyzing 60 best selling images for ‘active seniors’ was whether the subjects were looking at the camera, or elsewhere (e.g. at each other, out at the ocean etc.)
I was pretty blown away by this result – 72% more downloads per image when subjects were looking at the camera? The average for the set was 777.1 so the ‘looking at camera’ group performed well above the mean. This was also true for conversion rate (downloads/views) – Looking at Camera: 11.16% conversion; Looking Elsewhere – 9.24% conversion.
The Eyes Have It
According to this eye tracking study, viewers look at people’s eyes and they look where people are looking. As a result, I’m fairly sure that images of people looking at the camera are more engaging in search results and lead to higher click through and ultimately more downloads. This may also work in ads whereby people find eyes more engaging and arresting and therefore stop to look.
A Potential Problem
As you can see from the screen shot above (which is from the above-linked study), people look where the models are looking. If the model is looking at your text, more people read your text. As a result, the problem is the following:
- Model Looking at Camera -> Arresting ad, people look at it BUT they don’t read about your brand.
- Model Looking Sideways -> Less arresting ad BUT those who look will likely read your ad copy.
We may be caught in a little trap where buyers purchase images that engage them, produce ads that grab attention but make the customer look at the model, not at the product being advertised.
Conclusions
- Looking at the Camera images had more downloads per image and better conversion than images where people were looking elsewhere.
- It’s possible that even though these images are more engaging, they may lead to less effective ads.
- I think this is only something that can be answered by A/B testing, but I’d love to hear what you think. Also, if you create collections to explore this in your own data, I’d love to know what you find. I’ll be looking at this factor as I analyze more categories for future posts.
- Microstock photographers should shoot both.
- Maybe the ideal ad has two people – one looking at the camera to engage the viewer and another to look at the copy to get the viewer to read it
What do you think?
One of the core features of LookStat is automated image-level stats. When you create a LookStat account, our system builds a complete picture of your sales history for each image. Once this is complete, you can group images into collections and then start tracking performance of things like shoots, concepts, models etc.
Image Detail Screenshot
The screenshot above shows the earnings by week of the image above for last year. Clearly, this is a seasonal image for fall/thanksgiving and you can see how this plays out in the earnings chart. The image starts really selling in July (week 32) and then peaks in October (week 42) and drops down from there.
The lines on the chart are:
- Earnings – Weekly earnings of the image. This is the default time period when viewing a year, but you can also choose to view the data by month or by day.
- Downloads – Weekly downloads of the image. As stated above.
- T30 Earnings - This is the red line in the chart above and is the trailing 30 day moving average of the image’s earnings. This shows the overall trend line and is especially useful when viewing daily or weekly sales.
- Total Earnings – This is the cumulative earnings of the image over it’s entire lifetime. This should always be increasing. As you can see from the chart above, when the image isn’t selling, this line is flat.
- $/DL – This is the weekly earnings divided by the weekly downloads for the image. This line gives you a sense for the image sizes being downloaded. You can see above that the $/DL line peaks before the sales peak which is in line with the idea that print buyers use larger sizes
Transaction Register
In addition to the image charts, there is a transaction register that lists all transactions associated with that image. You can drill down by month and then by day to look at individual transactions.
Sign Up for the Beta
We’re expanding our beta program, so please contact us and we’ll get you activated. We’re really excited about the new functionality and we’d love to know what you think of it.
We’ve been working hard to significantly upgrade our analytics product and we’re getting very close to releasing it to our users. The system is about to enter a limited beta so we can get feedback on what’s working and what isn’t.
We are really excited about this upcoming upgrade and the potential it will have to help our users figure out which shoots are working and where to spend their time. There are many new changes and metrics available and I’ll be talking about them all over the next few days and weeks. Some highlights:
- True Daily RPI calculations
- Earnings, Downloads, Images online
- Sell-through rate
- Collection RPIs – compare your shoots apples to apples!
- lots more to come!
It has been too long since we’ve updated our stats product and this has changed. I hope you’re going to be excited about what you see and I’m confident the data will give you an edge that will help you sell more microstock!
As I mentioned, we will be reaching out to a small group of users and will be running a very tightly controlled beta. If you’re interested in trying out the service, please contact us and we’ll add you to our list!
To the many users that have trusted us so far, thanks for your support and please help us spread the word.
Two very interesting charts from www.marketingcharts.com, a site that provides easily digestible snapshots on media and advertising. Both of the charts below focus on display advertising i.e. some form of banner ad. This is where you’re most likely to see microstock & stock photography in action.
Top Online Advertisers by Category – Feb 2010
It’s quite clear that financial services at, 22% of total, is the leader of the pack in terms of ad impressions. This also lines up with business imagery being one of the top selling categories in microstock in general.
Top Financial Services Advertisers – Feb 2010
This too is a fascinating list. Online trading, credit scores, insurance, taxes, retirement – a rich array of conceptual categories worth exploring in your finance shoots if you’re not doing it already. Tax searches are highly seasonal as you would expect, with a steady increase in search volume from Jan-March followed by a dramatic spike during the week of April 15.
Food for Thought – Seasonality
I often think of seasonal events as being more related to holidays and greeting cards, but as the tax example shows, there are often seasonal cycles in other aspects as well. This isn’t something I’d explicitly considered when thinking about categories like business or medical shoots, but it does make sense.
According to the Society of American Florists (SAF), Christmas/Hannukah is the top holiday for flower sales in the USA.