Overview
Earlier this week I posted an analysis of Lifestyle, Business, and Medical searches by Collection. As a follow-up, I analyzed each contributor’s share of search results by counting the number of images they had in the Top 100 best match results for: ‘lifestyle’, ‘medical’, and ‘business’.
Top 25 Contributors by Share of Search Results
Observations:
- 129 contributors accounted for 300 results; average share: 0.7% (2.3 images) per contributor.
- 10% (31 images) of the results are Yuri’s. This is over 14x the average for this set of three searches.
- 42.3% of the results belong to the Top 10 contributors.
- Small improvements can make a big difference — moving from 2 to 3 images in best match matters.
Questions
- What do you think of this analysis?
- Are there other searches that interest you?
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Methodology
I searched on istock and recorded the top 100 Best match results for the following searches:
I analyzed the Top 100 images returned for each search. This post analyzes the results by collection. Future posts will look at contributors, downloads, and search placement.
Search Results by Collection
- 76% of lifestyle search results are either Agency (50%) or Vetta (26%). This is double what you see in medical and business searches.
- 29% of business search results are non-exclusive images. Of these 29 images, 20 belong to Yuri Arcurs. (The average is 2.1 images per contributor).
- 8.3% of all results were video files and only 1 search result was an audio file.
- 40% of all results were either Agency or Vetta files. However, they only account for 4.8% of downloads. This is most likely because the files in these collections are new.
Conclusions:
- Agency & Vetta results skew towards lifestyle. Keep this in mind when shooting & submitting.
- Audio & Video are niche business for iStock (less than 9% of best match results). Invest accordingly.
- It’s great to be exclusive. 80% of search results are from exclusives, much higher than I expected.
Which searches are you interested in analyzing? Let me know in the comments.
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Congrats on having your image plastered on the home page of iStock this week, Steve!
Steve (who is a Diamond Exclusive at iStock) also has a great post on his blog about working with us. Thanks for the plug, Steve. We’re excited to be working with you too.
Well, I’ve got a great accountant & I hire a good stylist as I need one. So I wised up & starting sending my images to LookStat – they add all the metadata, keywords & descriptions. LookStat handles the releases & then uploads the images & releases to my agency, istockphoto. If you use more than one agency they can upload to multiple agencies as well.
It’s so easy, I shoot, adjust my images then send the images to LooksStat via ftp. Done.
I don’t think we could have said it better ourselves – thanks Steve!
If you’d like to see what it’s like to only have to focus on creating your images, please contact us for a free trial.
We would like to congratulate Chris Gramly for having his image featured on istock as the Photo of the Week!
You should check out Chris’s website and his istock portfolio if you haven’t already.
PS: As we’ve blogged about earlier, Valentine’s Day images should start going up now. Happy New Year and Happy Shooting!
Istock’s original post on 2010 changes which we mentioned recently generated some controversy due to changes to their canister levels. They have made some changes and will be grandfathering non-exclusives at their old levels and for exclusive members, they will also climb one level at the old thresholds.
When the canister levels change on February 24, all members will still be grandfathered into their current level, and all Exclusive members will be grandfathered into the old levels for their next canister as well.
We promised we wouldn’t be mean-spirited when we looked at individual cases, but to ease people’s minds, we decided to go with the easiest implemenation. Every Exclusive will still need the same number of downloads to reach their next level.
So if you’re a silver Exclusive now with 2501 downloads, you will still be a silver after February 24. And you will still become gold when you hit 10,000 downloads.
After you’ve passed that next level, you will move into the new canister levels that we outlined in the orignal announcement.
This will apply to anyone who becomes Exclusive before February 24. If you’re interested in becoming Exclusive but will be prevented by other contractual obligations before that cut-off date, get in touch with us and we can work something out. Email us at artists@istockphoto.com before January 11 and we will arrange a wider window that works for you.
Now get out there and have a great holiday everybody. Happy New Year.
You can read the details at their forum.