LookStat – Microstock Analytics

John Lund, an owner of Blend Images & an RM & RF stock shooter (and all around great guy!) has a phenomenal post on his blog about how an art buyer found one of his images via Google Images.

She had found the image doing a Google Image search. Keep in mind this art buyer is very familiar with both Corbis and Getty. Interestingly enough, the social media image in question is with both Getty and Corbis (it is actually a Blend Images photo distributed through many agencies including the “Big Two”), but she found it first on my site!

John is doing a great job blogging and improving his site and images’ SEO. Your images won’t sell themselves if no one sees them and images without text around them are invisible on the web. I have a mini-rant on this topic coming soon, but in the meantime, check out John’s Blog and follow him on Twitter.

If you want to improve your images’ search footprint, get them keyworded, tell a story about them and get those images online! As long as your image hosting platform can read and use IPTC metadata appropriately you’ll be in good shape.

Source: National Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association

The chart above shows the Top 10 Leisure Activities for USA participants aged 55 and older from 2007.

Points to Note:

• Swimming & Fishing were higher on the list than I expected
• Overnight camping in the USA often involves a car or a recreational vehicle (RV) (if you look at the top searches for camping, the first two terms related to RV camping)

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.

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!

Soccer was fourth on our top leisure activities list. I have written about soccer before, but this post focuses on:

• Gender and Demographic Trends for Soccer in the USA
• Why 2010 is going to be a big year for Soccer Stock
• Top Search Keywords
• Stock Photography Search Results

2007 Participation by Gender

Source: Statistical Abstract of the USA

2007 Participation by Age Group

Source: Statistical Abstract of the USA

As you can see from the charts above, soccer in the USA is primarily a youth sport – 60% of participants are under 18 and the single largest age group is under 11. While it does skew more male than female, the difference is fairly small. Almost 40% of participants are female.

I decided to check out boys vs. girls vs. youth soccer to get a feel for the gender lines at that level and the results are interesting:

‘Girls soccer’ is searched for more often than ‘boys soccer’ by a factor of 2 and appears to be gaining in popularity. Definitely something to keep in mind when planning shoots & keywording.

Why 2010 is going to be a big Soccer Year? Two words – ‘World Cup’

The chart above shows Google Insights data for Soccer from 2004 to the present day. As you can see, there is a massive spike in a World Cup year. The tournament takes place every 4 years and the 2010 FIFA World Cup is being held in South Africa this year. The tournament runs from June 11 – July 11.

Top Search Keywords

The biggest surprise in the above list was the fact that ‘soccer pro’ was the top term (after ‘soccer’ by itself of course.) It’s not something that I would have intuitively thought to have as part of a keywording strategy. (One other tidbit: searches for indoor soccer peak in the winter.)

Stock Photography Search Results:

Initially, I was a little surprised to see Fotolia with the most results (normally it’s Shutterstock) but given that Fotolia is based in Europe, with traffic patterns to match, this makes perfect sense. This also explains Dreamstime’s large soccer collection as well.

Links to Search Results from Other sites:

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

Conclusions

• 2010 should be a good year for soccer stock, driven by the World Cup. You should find ways to incorporate this into your shoots & metadata.
• World Cup related images are already beginning to pop up in stock photography search results.
• In the USA, youth soccer and specifically girls soccer are important (Ellen mentioned this on my last soccer post.)
• This is an obvious point, but make sure you have soccer & football in your keywords.
• Searches for indoor, youth & boys and girls soccer all peak in the October/November time frame

Another point to keep in mind, soccer & sport in general aren’t always used literally. Concepts of competition, victory, power are all important advertising themes that athletics can illustrate.

About This Post

This is the second post in a two-post series about Yoga. The first post focused on general search and demographic trends while this post will focus on the following items:

• Stock Photography Trends
• Snapshot of Search Results from Major Sites
• Best Selling Yoga Concepts on Microstock

Stock Searches for Yoga

We conducted a search for yoga on a range of stock sites and Flickr to get a feel for the number of results.

As you can see Corbis & Getty have roughly 10,000 images for this search term, istock has 14,374 results which the remaining three microstock sites have roughly double the result count of iStock.

Intuitively, this result makes sense since the you would expect Corbis & Getty to have the fewest images and the larger microstock sites to have the most, with iStock somewhere in between. (This is in contrast to the ‘Running’ data where Getty, Istock & Fotolia all had roughly the same number of images.)

Note: Flickr, as usual dominated with over 270,000 results.

Comparison of Search Results for Yoga

We did a quick comparison of the default search results returned when you do a search for ‘yoga’ on all of the sites listed above. Links to all the searches are provided below and a screenshot of the results for iStock & Getty are shown below.

iStock (Best Match – ‘yoga’)

Getty Images (Default search – ‘yoga’)

I find the iStock results more compelling than those on Getty but I’m guessing that image buyers who license images from Getty aren’t doing so from the website. (It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves over time.)

Links to Results from Other sites:

• Corbis
• Dreamstime
• Fotolia
• Shutterstock
• Flickr

Best Selling Stock Images on Microstock

As Ellen Boughn suggested in her comment to part 1 of the Yoga series, there are two main settings for yoga stock photos. Nature and  yoga studios. There is also the ‘business person doing yoga’ theme but that isn’t downloaded as often.

As you can see from the screenshot of most downloaded yoga photos on iStock shown above, outdoor (beach and idyllic nature) yoga images account for fifteen out of the top twenty-eight results (54%).

However, if you add up the downloads (using the lower bound of the range supplied by istock) the nature images account for 22,500 of the 35,300 downloads generated by the 28 images above. This is roughly 64%

If you eliminate the top selling image, which generated 6,300+ downloads, then then nature images account for 56% of the total downloads.

This is too small an edge to be meaningful for a sample of this size. (We’ll look at this more definitively in the future.)

Conclusions from Part 2

• Getty & Corbis have far fewer images for Yoga than the microstock sites do.
• There is an even mix of nature & yoga school/studio images in the best-sellers at iStock.
• There are no images of older people doing yoga which may be an opportunity if you recall from part 1 that over 30% were 45 or older.
• Although ‘bikram/hot yoga’ was popular from a search standpoint, it wasn’t as prevalent in stock results. This may be because sweat doesn’t sell, but it’s probably a concept worth exploring

Conclusions from Part 1 (for reference)

• Yoga searches peak in January.
• Bikram/hot yoga is by far the most searched for form of yoga (15x more popular than the next highest term which was: ‘hatha yoga’.
• ‘Mats’ , ‘fitness’ , ‘classes’ are all in the top 10 in terms of keywords. Don’t ignore them on your images.
• Women outnumber men by roughly 6 to 1 in terms of yoga participation.
• The peak age segment is 25-34, but there are plenty of older (45+ particpants) as well.

About This Post
Yoga was ranked #2 in the data on our fastest growing recreational activities post. I’m breaking this profile into 2 parts for brevity’s sake. This post will cover the following:

• General Search Trends
• Popular Forms of Yoga
• Top Search Keywords
• Demographics of Particpants

Part 2 will cover stock photography search results and trends and will link to this one.

General Search Trends – 2004 – Present; USA

The chart above shows Google Insights for Search data  for ‘yoga’ from 2004 to the present day for the USA. There is a clear upward trend which you can see if you connect the peaks of the chart. In addition, like a lot of fitness-related terms (see our post on ‘weight loss’), there is a peak in January (resolutions anyone?) but a relatively steady volume of interest throughout the year.

Popular Forms of Yoga

The above chart shows Google Insights data for 2009 – Present for some popular forms of yoga. If you consider that Bikram & Hot yoga are thought of as the same thing then Bikram accounts for 84% of the above searches in Jan 2010.

Top 10 Search Keywords

Using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, I ran a quick search on yoga and sorted the results by global monthly search volume. The Top 10 are plotted below:

Participant Demographics

According to the Statistical Abstract  of the United States, there were 10.7 million yoga participants in 2007. In the charts below, the data are broken out by gender & age.

2007 Participation by Gender

As anyone who has ever set foot in a yoga studio will attest to, the data above are not surprising. It would be interesting to track this breakdown over time and see how it is changing.

2007 Participation by Age Group

The peak age group is 25-34 but there is strong participation in the older bands as well. Over 30% of participants were 45 or older.

Conclusions

• Yoga searches peak in January.
• Bikram/hot yoga is by far the most searched for form of yoga (15x more popular than the next highest term which was: ‘hatha yoga’.
• ‘Mats’ , ‘fitness’ , ‘classes’ are all in the top 10 in terms of keywords. Don’t ignore them on your images.
• Women outnumber men by roughly 6 to 1 in terms of yoga participation.
• The peak age segment is 25-34, but there are plenty of older (45+ particpants) as well.

Other Posts in This Series

• Top 10 Recreational Activities
• Top 5 Activities by Consumer Spending
• Activity Profiles
  • Running
  • Hunting
  • Weight Loss