Microstock Stats – Where Senior Couples Are Found

Posted on May 10th, 2010 in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

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.)

Walking: Stock Photography Trends (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on February 20th, 2010 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

About This Post

This is the second post in a two-post series about Walking for exercise. The first post focused on general search & demographic trends. This post is focused on stock photography trends relating to walking for exercise.
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Stock Photography Trends for ‘Walking for Exercise’
In order to isolate images around walking for exercise, I decided to look at the search results for ‘exercise walking’ as opposed to just walking. As a test, I also tried searching for ‘walking exercise’ and got back exactly the same number of results in the same order so it appears that search term order is not significant. This was true across all sites.
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If you just search for ‘walking’, you get an order of magnitude more images returned, but this because walking is an activity commonly photographed in a range of stock image categories. For the purposes of this discussion, exercise and walking are most relevant.
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Number of Images in Search Results for ‘exercise walking’
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The chart above shows the number of results obtained when searching for the terms ‘exercise walking’ on each of the sites listed. The biggest takeaway here was that iStock & Shutterstock returned almost the same number of results and that Getty actually had more images in that category than Fotolia. The normal pattern is that Shutterstock has by far the most results, followed by Dreamstime & Fotolia with iStock and then Getty & Corbis with the fewest images. I’m not sure what’s behind this, but this may be some art direction at work.
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Links to Default Stock Site Search Results for ‘exercise walking’
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Bestsellers
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The top result for the search on istock is an active senior woman which lines up well with our conclusions from the first post on ‘walking’. Most of the rest of the first page contains more lifestyle and relaxation oriented walking shots as opposed to walking for exercise. In fact, there is only one image on the first page which shows an older woman walking for exercise.
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An Image That Sells Well on Multiple Sites
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The image above is on the first page of iStock, Dreamstime & Fotolia when you search for ‘exercise walking’ and order the searches by downloads. Interestingly enough, this covers walking, but also hits assisted-living concepts and multi-generational concepts. As a stock image, it definitely spans a range of potential search terms and is well chosen and executed. The image has been downloaded over 1,000 times at iStock (where it is ranked #7) and over 700 times at Fotolia (where it is ranked #1).
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One point to note is that the title chosen was ‘One Step At a Time’ – I think this image could have seen more traffic if the title had been something like ‘Granddaughter helping Grandmother with Walker’ – less interesting to read, but more keyword dense. As I’ve written about before, titles matter a great deal in keywording.
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Conclusions from Part 2
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  • There does appear to be a relative lack of imagery around the sweet spot of the demographics for walking for exercise. It is probably worth testing this topic the next time you do a shoot involving seniors.
  • I saw no shots for walking seniors on white for this topic and that is somewhat surprising to me. This is another area that is probably worth exploring further.
  • Finding ways to cover a range of search terms can help broaden the potential uses for an image. Worth considering, but just be careful that you don’t compromise how well your image illustrates each individual concept.
Conclusions from Part 1 (for reference)
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  • Walking for exercise is the top leisure activity in the USA in terms of participation with close to 100 million people taking part in 2008!
  • Demographically speaking, the participants skew older & female; the top age segment is 45-64 years old.
  • Walking shoes represent the top footwear category in the USA and the demographics (not surprisingly) map closely with walkers.
  • ‘Walking shoes’ should be part of your keywording strategy since they are a high volume search query
  • Top related keywords are: “exercise, weight loss, calories, walking shoes”

Walking: Search & Demographic Trends (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on February 16th, 2010 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Walking for exercise was the most popular activity in terms of number of participants and was in the top ten when it came to year over year growth on our list of top leisure activities. Given an aging population, and a tough economy, it’s not surprising that walking is a popular leisure activity. To provide some context, in 2008, there were 96.6 million people who participated in ‘walking’ compared to ‘golf’ which had 25.5 million participants. Also, the number of walkers in 2008 was 11% higher than it was in 2007 which saw 89.9 million participants.

This will be a two part series. In this post, I’m going to look at:

  • Demographic & Gender Trends for Walking in the USA
  • Footwear Spending by Category
  • Walking Shoe Purchasers by Age & Gender
  • Top Search Keywords

The second post will focus on stock photography related to ‘walking’ and will link back to this one.

Participation by Gender

Source: NSGA, Statistical Abstract of the USA

Participation by Age

Source: NSGA, Statistical Abstract of the USA

Walking as a means of exercise clearly skews older (49% of participants 45 or older) and female (62.5% female). This data is also supported by the footwear spending data as you’ll see below.

Footwear Spending by Type of Shoe

Walking shoes accounted for 33% of the $12.5 billion dollars spent on footwear in 2007 (data for 2008 were projected to be similar and 2009 data are not available yet but if anything, I’d expect this to be more pronounced.)

Walking shoe Purchasers by Gender & Age

Digging into the walking shoe purchasers show that the same trends apply as the overall participation in walking. 45-64 is the biggest age group and the percentage of female users is identical to the percentage of female walkers.

Search Trends for Walking & Walking Shoes

The chart below shows data from Google Insights for ‘exercise walking’ and ‘walking shoes’ from 2008 to 2010.

There isn’t much seasonality, but ‘walking shoes’ are searched for 5 times more often than ‘exercise walking.’ This surprised me initially, but intuitively it makes sense that people would be searching for ‘walking shoes’ as opposed to for ‘exercise walking.’ The same caveats as those in our comments on running shoes apply – be careful of trademarked designs & logos.

Top Searches Related to ‘Exercise Walking’

Conclusions

  • Walking for exercise is the top leisure activity in the USA in terms of participation with close to 100 million people taking part in 2008!
  • Demographically speaking, the participants skew older & female; the top age segment is 45-64 years old.
  • Walking shoes represent the top footwear category in the USA and the demographics (not surprisingly) map closely with walkers.
  • ‘Walking shoes’ should be part of your keywording strategy since they are a high volume search query
  • Top related keywords are: “exercise, weight loss, calories, walking shoes”

I think the demographic trends around walking are fairly clear. This lines up well with general demand for imagery around ‘active seniors’ and this is something I’ll dive into in more detail in the second part of this post. Stay tuned and comments and feedback are always appreciated!

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