LookStat – Microstock Analytics

Environmental themes are common in microstock and I thought it would be helpful to share the top search keywords associated with ‘energy’ to aid in planning and keywording energy related microstock concepts.

Top Search Keywords (via Google Adwords Query Tool)

The big takeaways here are is that ‘solar energy’ is searched for twice as often as ‘wind energy.’ I also initially found ‘jobs’ surprising. With hindsight, it makes current sense given the current economic climate and that concept might be worth exploring as part of a shoot.

Google Insights Trends

I plotted 2008 data to get a sense for full-year seasonality and apart from a steady rise from Jan to April, there doesn’t appear to be a significant seasonality barring a decline from November to Jan which is likely due to Thanksgiving & Christmas.

While drilling into solar energy a little more, I found the regional data interesting as well. The top five regions are Nigeria, Pakistan, India & South Africa from a search volume perspective.

Implications for Microstock

Given the above data, it’s clear that solar should be at the top of your concept list and given the regional trends, varying the ethnicity of your models is probably worthwhile as well.

I analyzed and plotted the latest projections for degrees conferred from the U.S. Department of Education to show gender related trends. The graph below shows historical and projected data by gender for all degree types (Associated, Bachelors, Masters & Doctoral) from 2000-2015.

More Women than Men Graduating. Older Student Population (25+) Growing faster than the 18-24 Segment

Women have been graduating in greater numbers than men and the percentage of women graduates (shown in green) is continuing to rise.

Another interesting nugget was that the growth rates in enrollment for students aged 25 and older is projected to be significantly higher than for students aged 18-24. by 2018, students aged 25 & older are expected to account for 41% of the total college-enrolled population. (Source: US Dept. of Education – Projections of Education Statistics to 2018)

Potential Implications for Microstock Shoot Planning

I’m sure that most of you are already including men and women in your student & graduation shoots. It may also be worth experimenting with using older models in these shoots given the long-term trends around college enrollment.

While playing around with Google Insights data for Valentine’s day trends, I was somewhat surprised to find that there are on average 6 times as many searches for ‘valentine’s gifts for him’ as there are for ‘valentine’s gifts for her.’

I guess men just stick to flowers, chocolates & jewelry while women have a harder time with men’s gifts. On a slightly related note, flowers peak on Valentine’s Day & Mother’s Day with jewelry ruling the roost at Christmas time. I was a little surprised to see such a small uptick for jewelry at Valentine’s day but I suppose it’s fairly soon after Christmas.

When planning your shoots for Valentine’s day, it looks like flowers & chocolates will be your friends.

As part of my analysis of seasonal trends, I looked at LookStat‘s 2008 data for images tagged with ‘Easter’ as a keyword. In addition, I did some quick search keyword analysis to see if there were any useful pieces of data.

2008 Royalties for Images Tagged with ‘Easter’

Easter was on March 23, 2008 in the USA. As you can see from the chart above, the 7-day moving average crosses the daily mean about two months before the holiday itself. In this case, January 5. The peak of the curve is one week before the holiday on March 16. This is very similar to the patterns I saw in the Thanksgiving data.

Easter Eggs are 3 time More Popular Than the Easter Bunny

The Google Trends data for Easter shows an identical pattern to the microstock earnings data shown above. One very interesting nugget that jumped out was in the search keywords. There are 3x as many searches for Easter eggs as there are for the Easter Bunny. I’m not sure why this was surprising to me but i had expected the Bunny to fare a little better.

Conclusion

Easter will be on Sunday, April 4, 2010 in the USA. There’s still time to get your Easter images online before the sales really start to ramp in January/late Feb. Also, don’t forget to decorate and shoot those Easter Eggs!

When analyzing the data for Thanksgiving image sales, I was intrigued by how close to the holiday the sales peak was. I assumed that the early increase would be print sales and that online uses would prevail closer to the time of the holiday. My hypothesis was that if I dug into the earnings per download ($/DL) data, I would see a high value early (print) that declined as online sales grew.

This was not the case. The real peak was the weekend before Thanksgiving.

2008 Earnings per Download for Images Tagged with ‘Thanksgiving’

Earnings Per Download Peak One Week Before Thanksgiving – Not What You’d Expect

The moving average for both earnings & downloads are shown as an underlay on the chart above. As you can see, there is jump in $/DL in August, three months before Thanksgiving, which coincides with the initial volume peak. The $/DL declines a little until mid-September but then begins climbing again and peaks on November 23rd which is the weekend before Thanksgiving.

The early peak at the end of August does seem to coincide with the notion of print sales & magazines. The increasing number however suggests that there are print uses all the way up until the holiday itself. It seems unlikely that individual online buyers would buy large sizes or ELs.

Possible explanations:

• Print lead times have compressed and corporate buyers are making final decisions much closer to the release date than initially assumed

• Retail Sale Circulars & Newspaper inserts etc may play a large role and their volume runs may require ELs. This would fit the notion of the peak being the weekend before Thanksgiving when all the specials etc go out

I’d love to hear your experiences and thoughts on what might be happening. We’ll be examining data for other seasonal events to see what we can find.

One of the things that interests me around seasonal holidays is the timing of changes in sales velocity of microstock images associated with those holidays. The goal is to identify when to shoot & upload images in order to benefit the most from the seasonal spikes in interest.

The chart below shows a 7-day moving average of the royalties for images with the keyword ‘thanksgiving’ in 2008 and it also overlays the daily mean for those images on the same chart.

2008 Royalties for Images Tagged with ‘Thanksgiving’

The royalties crossed the daily average for the year on August 22, peaked on November 23rd and then dropped off from there. The total volume of royalties between August 22 & November 28 accounted for over 63% of the year’s total. You had to be in early to maximize your benefit, but it would have been worthwhile to continue submitting images throughout September & October.

It seems reasonable to see sales start to climb three months before the holiday itself, but it was interesting to see them peak so close to the actual date of Thanksgiving, which was November 27, 2008 in the USA. I’m speculating here but, the early start would seem to coincide with the print & retail calendars and the continued strength suggests more online uses as we got closer to the holiday itself.

(As an aside, it may make sense to buy props and shoot immediately after a holiday when prices are low and your outdoor shots will still look season appropriate. I’m sure some of you out there are already doing exactly this.)

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this if you get a chance. What has your experience been with seasonal images?

This is a guest post by Rasmus Rasmussen who among other things (listed in his more official bio below) is the author of The Microstock Guide, the creator of the Stock Photo Concept generator and is an all around great guy. Thanks for sharing your thoughts! (Also, all the photography in this post is his.)

5 Ways to Improve your Photography with Stats
I am a stat whore. To a certain extent, I think most of us are. People who follow sports often obsess over the performance stats of their favorite leagues, teams and individual players. They call it trivia. As a microstock photographer however, it can be so much more than that.

For us it’s a tool. Here is a list of some of the ways statistics can help us microstockers perform better.

Watch for trends, seasonal and otherwise

By keeping up with your stats, you will notice when the clients are busy working on upcoming holidays for instance. Christmas advertisements are typically not created in December, but in advance. If you shoot anything seasonal, use your stats to figure out when to upload, so your images will be fresh and timed just right.

You can also watch for declining trends, like when certain lighting styles become popular or when hairstyles change.

Find models that work
Comparing top selling images across models is a very good way to check their individual performance. If one of your models sell significantly more than the rest, or vice versa, you can book your next sessions accordingly.

Next, if you compare all your top performing models, you can start to look for patterns, similarities and other indicators of the usefulness of these particular shots.

Find props, lighting and locations that work
Sometimes the models are not as important as everything else in the shot. I’m sure still life and landscape photographers would agree. Again by comparing individual shots in a series, and top selling shots across multiple photo sesssions, you can look for similarities. Maybe a certain lighting setup works better than another one you’ve tried, or a certain location you’ve shot at.

Based on this knowledge, you can re-use successful elements in new ways, combine them differently and avoid those that seem to lessen the commercial value of your imagery.

Hone your concepts
Good stock photography is often concept based. You start with a basic idea, and you build on it and add to it using different poses, props, post-processing techniques etc. Some results will be strong and sell well, but the ones that don’t are actually more interesting. When an entire photo series fails to perform, compare it to similar ones that did well and look for differences. Maybe you overdid the make-up or left out vital elements. Maybe your problem lies in how you keyword your images, and not in the concepts at all!

Take note of these things, as you analyze your sales, and eventually your overall hit rate is bound to go up.

Calculate the ROI of your shoots
Return on Investment or ROI is a fancy way of saying: Is it worth it? If you are a serious microstocker, you will want strong shots that make it worth your time. Getting a professional looking image often requires direct financial investments covering anything from equipment and studio renting to hiring stylists, models or assistants. Not to mention all the time you put into organizing, executing and post processing the shoot. Using sales stats, you can easily add up how much you’ve earned per shoot.

If after one year, you have made more from your sales, than you invested into the photo session in question, I would call it a successful shoot. And if not, take the opportunity to figure out what went wrong.

About theprint
Rasmus shoots primarily urban lifestyle portraits and has been active in microstock since 2000, the last few years as an image inspector for iStockphoto. He is the author of “The Microstock Photographer’s Guide” and also does one-on-one coaching for photographers looking to get established in microstock. When he’s not involved with photography, he writes novels, music and lives the Bohemian lifestyle. His own microstock portfolio lives on iStockphoto, he blogs at rasmusrasmussen.com and is an avid Twitter user.