LookStat – Microstock Analytics

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.

If buyers didn’t break for lunch, would sales be higher?

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 beautifully designed wedding websites 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.

While doing some research on general marketing trends, I came across an interesting Brandweek article on Hispanic Marketing titled “Hispanic Market is Set to Soar” which was published on Nov 2, 2009.

While I think the fact that the Hispanic segment is growing is probably relatively well known, the article talks about the emergence of ‘second-generation, bilingual, bicultural consumers.” The implication of this from a marketing perspective was illustrated very well by a quote from Cristina Vilella, Director of Marketing for McDonald’s USA:

“We lead with Hispanic insights but make sure they appeal to the general market.”

The article is a good quick read and it’ll be interesting to see how the macro trends show up in microstock sales over the next few months and years.

(As an aside, the article is illustrated with a microstock photo – “Family Having Fun by Andresr“)

Ellen has shared some great insight in her comment which was non-obvious to me. I’ve updated the end of the post to include her thoughts.

Given that it’s (American) football season, I decided to take a look at microstock earnings stats for ‘football’ and also decided to look at the stats for ‘soccer’ while I was at it.

2008 Microstock Earnings Data for ‘football’ vs ‘soccer’ by Month

The two lines track very closely until the summer when you start to see the line for ‘football’ show an increase. This isn’t surprising since every image tagged with ‘soccer’ is probably also tagged with ‘football’. Thus, to a rough degree, you’d expect solid overlap until the American Football season in the USA starts up in the summer.

I decided to compare this with data from Google Insights for search for the same search terms and limit the results to Image Search Data for 2008 in the USA.

As you can see, the form of the curves is quite similar to the microstock sales data in the prior chart. I expect there to be more congruence between the two charts over time as microstock sites improve their SEO. One point to keep in mind is that the US data is the only level at which you see this curve shape. Soccer is a much more popular sport when viewed at a global level.

Microstock Implications (Updated  with Ellen Boughn’s terrific comment)

There can be no question that globally, soccer is a much more popular game than American football. However, there is a discernible bump associated with the American football season in the United States. While it’s a small fraction of the total sales for the ‘football’ category of images, it is not insignificant and probably worth adding to your portfolio.

Via Ellen Boughn (who is awesome!) – Follow her: @ellenboughn on Twitter

Globally soccer is more popular, but globally America has the largest percentage of any country of stock photo buyers…distorting the need for football pics over soccer. Yet the most popular sport in the US…with respect to the number of people involved…is kid’s soccer. So shoot US football that can pass as pro or college and kids 13 and younger playing soccer. I should also mention that girl’s soccer is really important.