LookStat – Official Blog

Nielsenwire has an article on their blog, called “US Demographics are Changing…Are Your Marketing Plans Ready?”, which was posted on March 10. In the article, Tom Pirovano, Director of Industry Insights at Nielsen writes about the fact that by 2050 over half the US population will be non-white (according to the US census) and discusses some of the marketing implications, with a focus on consumer packaged goods (CPG) sales.

Some snippets from the article:

• “Hispanic shoppers tend to spend more on categories for babies and children — (Hispanic households represent 11.8% of CPG total spending, but 16.6% of disposable diaper sales.)”
• “African American shoppers tend to spend more on health and beauty products, like fragrance (African Americans represent 11.0% of CPG total spending, but 20.3% of dollars spent in beauty supply stores.)”
• “Asian American shoppers tend to spend more in club stores. Asian Americans represent 3% of CPG total spending, but 5.5% of dollars spent in warehouse clubs.”

In another article on 2009 Muti-cultural ad spending, there are two tables which outline top advertising categories for Spanish & African American media. The top growth categories in 2009 were Satellite Communications services for Spanish media and Insurance (general & auto) for African American media. The end of the article contains details on how the company defines the two media segments and also lists details on categories and their sizes in dollars.

Implications

• Ethnic diversity is an important part of stock photography shoot planning. As you plan your shoots, it’s worth digging deeper into trends by segment so you can incorporate elements that matter to the demographics you are targeting.
• It’s not easy to incorporate CPG ideas into shoots since most products are heavily branded, and it’s often hard to get permission to shoot in a store, for example. Still, with some creativity it’s definitely possible to illustrate concepts like shopping in bulk, shopping for beauty products vs. kids products etc.

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

Luis Alvarez, who shoots for iStock & Getty, has a great post on his blog about how he uses LookStat collections to track his shoot ROI.

It was only just recently, about 3 weeks ago, that I had a deeper look into LookStat.com, and was surprised to finally discover a tool to help me improve measuring return on investment (ROI). In LookStat you can set up a collection of pictures (suitably the results of one photo session) and LookStat will tell you how much money those pictures have generated. You have different viewing options and charts, making it easy to understand.

Luis’s approach is to invest in research and quality. This in turn means that he’s careful about tracking his return. His top returning series is shown below:

We created the collections feature to allow photographers to do just this. Stay tuned for more on this coming soon!

Luis also has another post about his Getty & iStock earnings trends. This too is well worth a read and his final chart on iStock vs. Getty RPI is fascinating. It lines up well with our thoughts about the rapidly fading distinction between microstock & traditional stock photography.

You can check out Luis’ work at iStock and you he’s @velaphoto on twitter.

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.

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.

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.

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.