LookStat – Official Blog

While doing some research into travel, I came across some data on the cities that were most visited by travelers to the USA from Overseas.

Top US Cities Visited by Overseas Travelers

Source: Statistic Abstract of the USA

Note the data above exclude visitors from Canada & Mexico.) I wasn’t surprised to see NYC at the top of the list, but I was surprised that Los Angeles was the second most visited city. Given the fact that Orlando is ranked in the top 6 as well, I’m guessing that Disney is the main driver of those visits.

The rest of the top 10 in order were:

7. Honolulu, HI
8. Washington DC
9. Chicago, IL
10. Boston, MA

2007 Visitors to the USA by Country of Origin

Source: Department of Homeland Security

The chart above shows visitors to the USA by country of origin. It includes both tourists and business travelers but excludes most short term visitors from Mexico & Canada.

Stock Photography Search Results

I decided to do a quick set of searches to see how many results there were for some of the top cities at a range of sites.

The thing that stands out the most is the massive drop off when it comes to images of Orlando, especially given that there were more visitors total (domestic & international) to Orlando (48.9 Million) than there were to NYC (47 million) in 2008. A quick check of downloads however suggests that there may not be as much demand for Orlando imagery.

Another thing I found surprising was the sheer number of Getty results. As it turns out, they include the location of the shoot in their keywords. This makes no sense to me. If I’m searching for ‘New York City’ I don’t really want a picture of a man taken in a studio in New York, I want something that evokes the city.

iStockphoto Search Results for ‘New York City’

Getty Images Search Results for New York City

Summary

• New York was visited by 8.2 million overseas travelers in 2008; about three times the number who visited the #2 destination which was Los Angeles. It’s also the destination that draws the most dollars from tourists at $30billion. (Source: NYC Go Stats)
• Orlando seems to be radically under-represented from a stock image perspective when you consider total travelers. Granted, most visitors are domestic but presumably they are still being shown images of the city when they make their travel choices. Studying downloads however suggests that people just aren’t licensing as many images – I’m not sure how to explain this but would welcome your thoughts in the comments.

Running/Jogging was at the top of list of fastest growing leisure activities in the USA in 2008. As part of our series on profiling these sports, we’re looking at search and general trends and then examining search results from a range of stock and microstock sites.

Search Trends: Women, Men & Shoes

Although it’s close, there are more searches for women’s running than those for men and ’shoes’ is the most common search term associated with both gender’s searches. This isn’t all that surprising if you consider that most of the dollars spent in running is likely spent on shoes. Shoes aside, other terms that showed up highly in searches were: ‘trail running’ and ‘running shorts.’

NB: One other item that will be important for your IPTC Titles – ‘Women’s running’ generated 50% more monthly searches than ‘Womens Running’. The same was true for ‘Men’s’ vs. ‘Mens’. Google thinks the apostrophe is significant; you should too.

Participation by Age Group

Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States/NSGA

Things that stood out:

• There are a lot of people in their mid-forties to mid-fifties who are running
• The 25-34 age group is probably a sweet spot for marketers, because they are the biggest segment and they probably earn more than the 18-24 age group

Stock Searches for ‘Running’

As part of this profile, we looked at the number of search results for the term ‘running’ on some major stock agencies, top microstock sites, and Flickr. The results are plotted on the chart below (except for Flickr, which returned 3.7 million results thus making everyone else look non-existent.)

Things that stood out:

• Shutterstock has the most returned images by far. It has 3+ times as many images as iStock for example, but the total library size isn’t that much larger. Therefore there are proportionally more running images at SS than at iStock. I’m not really sure why this should be true, but it is interesting nonetheless.
• Getty has almost as many images for ‘running’ as iStock, Fotolia & Dreamstime. I was somewhat surprised since I expected that Getty’s collection would be much more tightly edited.

Links to Search Results for ‘Running’

Corbis

Dreamstime

Fotolia

Getty

iStockphoto

Shutterstock

Flickr

Conclusions

• Shoot a mix of genders and age groups
• Shoes are searched for often. While ‘running shoes’ should be on your metadata, there is a chance that it may be less relevant for stock since the shoe companies are going to be shooting their own products on people’s feet.
• The apostrophe’s are significant. If the term is relevant to your image, use Women’s and Men’s in your IPTC headings & descriptions.

Given that Valentine’s Day is around the corner and I’ve already posted about Easter, I thought I would take a look at the other upcoming holidays. As part of this research, I found some fascinating stats on on number of greeting cards sent by occasion at Hallmark.com. I’ve added the table below.

I was a little surprised to see Mother’s Day so high on the list. The fact that 50% more cards are sent on Mother’s Day vs. Father’s day is interesting as well. Also, according to Hallmark’s page on Mother’s Day, this is the largest card-sending holiday for the Hispanic community. As a quick test, I did a search on iStock for ‘Mother’s Day’ and sort by downloads – three of the top 5 images have ‘Latin American & Hispanic Ethnicity’ in their keywords.

iStock – Ordered by Downloads

I also thought it would be interesting to take a look at the first row of results that get returned on the default search sort order from iStock, Getty, Corbis & Flickr

Corbis – Best Match

Flickr – Relevance

Getty Images – Default Sort

iStockphoto – Best Match

In general, there’s a similar feel to the stock images but Flickr stands out with the dominance of floral shots in the top search results. Not sure what to make of that pattern but I wouldn’t recommend shooting more flowers. The agencies have more than enough of those.

In terms of what wasn’t there, I was a little surprised not to see more ‘breakfast in bed’ and ‘mum chilling out’ type shots. Another odd thing to me was that there were virtually no men in any of the shots. Given than 2007 was a peak in US history for new births, I thought I’d see more ‘young mother & husband & baby’ images.

Things to Note

• Mother’s Day in the USA is Sunday, May 9th in 2010 (if seasonal microstock trends hold, then 2-3 months before is the time to start uploading)
• Gifts, cards, brunch & flowers are the top related search keywords

I’d love to hear your perspectives on what has and hasn’t worked in your mother’s day shots. In any case, I’m going to make sure I don’t short change my Dad this year.

It’s not stock photography, but Mashable has an interesting post about profile pics and dating responses on OKCupid. The post is about profile pics and stats; the results will probably surprise you.

The myths:

• It’s Better to Smile
• Phone & Webcam Photos are Creepy
• Leave Something to the Imagination
• Let them see you face

As always, pay attention to the numbers!

Also, here’s the the original post on OKCupid (nice work & great post!)

UPDATE: I added a chart of average % of traffic by country across all the sites. I think it’s more informative than the visits chart.

The comments on my post last week about sales & time of day spurred me to take a look at traffic  by geography for some of the larger microstock sites. I used Alexa to get traffic breakdown by country and then took the November 2009 visitor numbers from Compete for each site. By combining these two data sets, I was able to come up with a list of visitors by country. The sites in question were: 123rf, Dreamstime, Fotolia iStockphoto, Shutterstock & Stockxpert. My hypothesis is that traffic is a reasonable proxy for buyers since submitter traffic will barely register on this scale. (millions of buyers vs. hundreds of thousands of contributors.)

Millions of Visitors by Country to 123, DT, FT, IS, SS, SXP

There are a number of issues and caveats with this data.

• I assumed that the traffic was independent and merely added the number of visitors for each country. This is likely inaccurate as there is probably a fair amount of overlap. Still, directionally, I think the data is reasonable.
• India as the #2 country really surprised me and I think it’s more likely to be an issue with the Alexa country level data as opposed to anything else. If you ignore India, then USA, Germany, UK as big markets for microstock make sense to me.
• Japan seemed fairly low down for such a large economy. Again, either a data issue, or there are localized sites that are important that I’m not aware of.

Average % of Traffic by Country to 123, DT, FT, IS, SS, SXP (Average of Alexa data by country for each site)

% of Traffic by Country for Each Site

In addition to the total traffic above, I thought it would be instructive to plot the composition of each site’s traffic on a chart to show at a glance where their traffic was coming from.

As you can easily see, most of the sites have very similar traffic profiles, except Fotolia which gets a large share of its traffic from Germany. The same caveat about India applies here. The other thing that’s clear from this site is how quickly things drop off after the top three countries.

Conclusions

I think there are too many questions about the underlying data to draw too many concrete conclusions, but there probably is some directional validity here. Regardless, take any conclusions with a healthy serving of salt.

If you take the numbers at face value, then USA, Germany and the UK account for 49.8% of the total traffic to these sites based on the methodology above. If you consider traffic as an imperfect, but reasonable proxy for buyers, then it’s important to think about themes in these three countries that should be present as you plan your shoots.

If anyone has thoughts, questions, or opinions other than data anomalies about why India shows up as #2, I’d love to hear them. Also, I’d love to know if the list of countries lines up with your experience in the industry.

Last week I wrote about total earnings and downloads and the trends associated with pricing, downloads and earnings. In this post, I looked at the same data and adjusted for active users in that year to get an average per user for the year in question. The results are shown below (the earnings per download line is carried over from last week.)

User-adjusted Earnings and Downloads 2002-2009

Key Takeaways

• Declining downloads per user after 2007
• Slowing growth in earnings per user
• Increasing earnings per download

Although earnings per user have continued to rise, the downloads per user peaked in 2007 and have since declined about 20% from 2007 to 2009. These data support some of the things I heard at PDN and UGCX about flat downloads and increased earnings driven by price increases.

Increasing Competition & Higher Standards

As more contributors enter microstock, especially in a down economy when people are looking for other sources of income, there has been an increasing sense  that it is harder than ever to make money in microstock. If you layer on tougher acceptance standards, you can make a case that new contributors will have a tougher time establishing themselves in the market. This then suggests lower downloads and lower earnings per contributor

Competition isn’t the Whole Story

Increased competition and tougher standards only account for part of what is happening. I think there is no question that new contributors and images are entering the market at increasing rates. If the growth of new users exceeds the growth of the overall downloads, then we’ll see a decline in the per user averages. If increasing competition was the only factor however, we would also expect to see a decline in earnings per user. Clearly, this is not the case. Also, one thing that isn’t clear here is if competition is actually hurting established players or whether new entrants are just struggling without creating an impact on existing users. (A cohort analysis could help illuminate this but that is a post for another day.)

On Average, Users Are Earning More

Price increases by the agencies and increased pricing of individual images as they begin selling more are factors driving up user earnings. As contributors gain experience and their images sell, they benefit from increased pricing for their images as well as better placement in search results. There is a little survivor bias at work – you only stick around if you’re seeing success. It is interesting that this effect is more than compensating for the reduction due to competition, market factors etc.

Conclusions

It is harder to break in to microstock and succeed but there is no question that the market has grown overall, through difficult times. While there are many new entrants and standards are rising, increasing earnings per user suggest there is still opportunity in the market.

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts and interpretation in the comments.

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.

We recently rolled out some enhancements to the LookStat site which we hope you’ll find useful. As always, feedback and comments are appreciated.

New Thumbnail Grid

We have upgraded our thumbnail grid on the site to show image orientation. While it’s not as clean visually as square thumbnails, image format is an important part of analyzing sales and this was the primary driver of the change. (Thanks for the feedback on this one!) The new thumbnails coupled with the collections feature will allow you to analyze the sales of different image formats such as horizontal, vertical, square etc. I’d love to hear if your data mirror what we saw in our aggregate analysis of 2008 image format data.

Manual Image Match (Private Beta)

We have added the ability to manually correct the matches made by our system when tracking images across multiple sites. This allows you to break apart incorrect matches and allows you to match images that the system missed. If you’re interested in using this feature, please let me know in the comments, on Twitter or from our contact form. This is an early version of the feature and feedback and suggestions for improvement are much appreciated.

Once activated, you’ll see a link on the left panel of each image detail page (which you get to by clicking on a thumbnail anywhere in your account.)

From here you can click ‘Unmatch’ to remove an incorrect match, or if you select ‘Match Image’ you’ll be taken to a screen that shows the rest of the images in your portfolio.

You can narrow down the list by site. After you match images, it takes about an hour for the system to recompute totals. If portfolio data (see next section) has been activated for your account, you’ll see images sorted by upload date in descending order. If not, they’ll be sorted by date of first sale.

Complete Portfolio & Image Upload Date

We are in the process of rolling out the ability to see all images (not just images with sales data) and to track image upload date in your LookStat account. We will be rolling this functionality out to all users before long but if you’d like it sooner, just let us know and we’ll see what we can do. In the near future, we’ll be using this data to display stats like RPI (that takes into account image age) and sell through rate.

Feedback Appreciated

If you use any of these features, please let us know what you think and how we can make things better. Thanks for all your support and feedback!

I was chatting with the CEO of Nearlyweds.com, a Seattle startup that provides wedding web sites for newly engaged couples and he mentioned to me that peak wedding planning season is January – May. This is because there are a ton of engagements around New Year’s and another small spike around Valentine’s Day. I decided to dig around to see if I could come up with any useful insights for wedding photographers since they would be selected in the planning phases. While the data and the conclusions may be well known to pro wedding photographers and stock shooters, I felt they were worth sharing.

Wedding Photographers – Peak Searches Occur In January

The peak of search volume for ‘wedding photographers’ occurs in January as you can see from the Google Insight chart above. The top keywords associated with ‘wedding photographers are:

Top Search Terms Related to ‘Wedding Photographer’

If you are a wedding photographer and you don’t yet have an SEO-friendly page that talks about the keyword terms above, you should create one immediately. Write a blog post, put up a simple about page – it doesn’t matter how simple it is, something is better than nothing.

Dresses & Cakes Rule when it comes to Image data

In addition to looking at data on ‘wedding photographers,’ I also looked at search & image trends around ‘wedding’. The main thing that jumped out at me was the importance of dresses & cakes.

Searches for wedding dresses and wedding cakes account for 47% and 33% of the top 10 searches respectively. I’m assuming that wedding photographers know this already. It’s probably worth taking into account from a microstock perspective as well.

2009 Image Search Data for ‘Wedding’

As you can see, in 2009 searches for images related to ‘wedding’ have a spike in January and then climb steadily until July. From a microstock perspective, it’s probably time to start thinking about and planning your wedding-themed shoots.

Brides are More Important than Grooms (much more important.)

I think we all knew this, but the spread in search volume is impressive. The Google Insights data shows roughly 5.5x more searches for brides than grooms. I’m not married, but I’m sure that this search data can be corroborated from primary sources…

Conclusions & Microstock Implications

• Wedding Photographers – get an SEO-friendly page online ASAP. No flash, use text, use the keywords shown above and do it now!

• Brides, Dresses, Cakes are the most searched for images

• Jan-July is the time to be uploading your microstock images (I’ll post later on microstock data related to weddings)

Business images are some of the best sellers in microstock and it is a competitive category. I plotted 2008 earnings data for images tagged with ‘business’ and also looked into Google Image search trends for the terms ‘business man’ , ‘business people’ and ‘business woman’ in 2008. The results are charted below.

2008 Royalties for Microstock Images Tagged with ‘business’

Apart from the Christmas holidays, sales of business images are strong throughout the year and rise from September to November. I hadn’t expected to see any real variation throughout the year so found this curve shape to be interesting.

I decided to look at Google Image search data for business man, business woman and business people since the generic data for ‘business’ ranked these terms highly in the related searches

2008 Google Image Search Data for ‘Business’

2008 Google Image Data for ‘Business Man’, ‘Business People’ and ‘Business Woman’

There does appear to be a lull in the summer and a drop off at Christmas. It isn’t as pronounced as the microstock data, however. I found it interesting that ‘business people’ was more common than ‘business woman.’ This has remained true in the 2009 data but the gap between the three terms has closed.

Business Man

Business People

Business Woman

Some Observations

Business images are a competitive category and as Lee has stated in his long tail post - if you’re going to compete in it, you will be competing on quality. Some observations that may help:

• Business images sell well all year round. No real surprise here.
• Suits rule! One thing that is new in 2009 is that ‘business casual’ made the top 10 list of image searches for ‘business.’ Will be interesting to see if that continues
• Keywords I would pay attention to: ‘happy, working, professional, suit, talking, black, meeting, black, old, suit, casual.’
• I found it interesting that ‘business card’ and ‘business cards’ were the top two searches for ‘business’ on Google Images.
• ‘black’ was the only ethnic modifier in the top 10. I would have expected to see ‘hispanic’ as well. By the way, the top result on Google image search for ‘black business woman’ is a Fotolia image. The only other microstock site in the top 12 is istock. It should be no surprise that the image on Fotolia is in their Infinite Collection.