I decided to analyze the orientation of the Top 60 images from the Active Seniors searches that I’ve been writing about and the results of that analysis are in the table below:
Key Points
- Horizontal images are the most numerous & best performing, on all metrics – conversion (dls/views), views per image and downloads per image.
- No square images in the top-sellers, in spite of the notion that square thumbnails do better.
- You are leaving money on the table if you don’t shoot horizontal and vertical formats
This isn’t really all that surprising. When we last analyzed the impact of shooting horizontal vs. vertical vs. square across millions of transactions, we came to the same conclusion – Revenue per image for Horizontal shots was twice that of other formats. Our reasoning was that as usage shifted online & microstock is purchased for online uses, horizontal image formats work best.
Are you using LookStat collections to see these trends in your sales? What are you seeing?
As I mentioned in my earlier post, couples were the most popular theme for active senior images. I was interested in the setting for the images (indoors vs. outdoors) and decided to analyze the impact on downloads and downloads per image.
I found the difference is very interesting. Even though there are over three times as many pictures of active seniors in outdoor settings vs. indoor settings, the downloads per image are significantly higher. Indoor shots perform 28% better in terms of downloads per image.
The average for all couple shots is 781.3 downloads per image, so indoors are doing better there too. I think it would be worth adding some indoor compositions to your portfolio if you’re shooting active seniors.
Jonathan Ross has been a long time supporter and customer at LookStat and I’m delighted to be able to congratulate him and his network of top notch photographers on the launch of a new RM/RF stock Agency, Spaces Images. The collection is initially available at Corbis.
The collection is focused on images of human environments (interiors, locations etc) that have nobody in them. There are some fantastic shots in the collection and it’s well worth your time to check them out. Jonathan’s long experience in RM/RF helped him discover an opportunity for shots without people in them and he created Spaces to take advantage of it.
LookStat’s Role
We provided a Back Office platform that allowed Jonathan & his contributors to focus on creating the images and shaping the collection while we handled keywording, property releases, metadata, image conversion and distribution. We simplified the submission process for contributors and greatly reduced infrastructure & technology costs for Spaces.
It’s a pleasure working with Jonathan & the team of contributors at Spaces and we’re looking forward to the success and growth of the collection in the days to come.
If you are interested in how our comprehensive Back Office solution can help you, please contact us for more information.
Congrats on having your image plastered on the home page of iStock this week, Steve!
Steve (who is a Diamond Exclusive at iStock) also has a great post on his blog about working with us. Thanks for the plug, Steve. We’re excited to be working with you too.
Well, I’ve got a great accountant & I hire a good stylist as I need one. So I wised up & starting sending my images to LookStat – they add all the metadata, keywords & descriptions. LookStat handles the releases & then uploads the images & releases to my agency, istockphoto. If you use more than one agency they can upload to multiple agencies as well.
It’s so easy, I shoot, adjust my images then send the images to LooksStat via ftp. Done.
I don’t think we could have said it better ourselves – thanks Steve!
If you’d like to see what it’s like to only have to focus on creating your images, please contact us for a free trial.
In the Top 60 images (by downloads) of Active Seniors, at Dreamstime, Fotolia & iStock, the most common theme is ‘couples’ – men and women holding hands. I decided to break down the images of couples by setting and the results are below.
Couples in parks account for just under half the number of images of couples but represent 63.5% of the downloads. It’s interesting that even though Parks were the most common setting, they still perform above average for the set. (As an aside, even though ‘home’ & ‘dock’ have extremely high download per image ratios, given that there was only one image in each setting, it’s important to not read too much into those numbers. More data is required.)
As part of an ongoing series of posts about active seniors (see part 1 & part 2), I took at look at what the models were doing in the best selling images. The table below shows the Top 60 images (Top 20 @ iStock, Fotolia & Dreamstime) categorized by what people are doing in the photos.
The most common activity by far is hugging. It’s interesting that images of seniors hugging perform slightly worse than average from a downloads per image perspective. Also, I realize that hugging is a loose interpretation of activity, but I’m the messenger here. 14 of 17 images were couples hugging; (2 were friends and 1 was of grandparent/grandson.) Love must get stronger with age 
One of the factors I looked at when analyzing 60 best selling images for ‘active seniors’ was whether the subjects were looking at the camera, or elsewhere (e.g. at each other, out at the ocean etc.)
I was pretty blown away by this result – 72% more downloads per image when subjects were looking at the camera? The average for the set was 777.1 so the ‘looking at camera’ group performed well above the mean. This was also true for conversion rate (downloads/views) – Looking at Camera: 11.16% conversion; Looking Elsewhere – 9.24% conversion.
The Eyes Have It
According to this eye tracking study, viewers look at people’s eyes and they look where people are looking. As a result, I’m fairly sure that images of people looking at the camera are more engaging in search results and lead to higher click through and ultimately more downloads. This may also work in ads whereby people find eyes more engaging and arresting and therefore stop to look.
A Potential Problem
As you can see from the screen shot above (which is from the above-linked study), people look where the models are looking. If the model is looking at your text, more people read your text. As a result, the problem is the following:
- Model Looking at Camera -> Arresting ad, people look at it BUT they don’t read about your brand.
- Model Looking Sideways -> Less arresting ad BUT those who look will likely read your ad copy.
We may be caught in a little trap where buyers purchase images that engage them, produce ads that grab attention but make the customer look at the model, not at the product being advertised.
Conclusions
- Looking at the Camera images had more downloads per image and better conversion than images where people were looking elsewhere.
- It’s possible that even though these images are more engaging, they may lead to less effective ads.
- I think this is only something that can be answered by A/B testing, but I’d love to hear what you think. Also, if you create collections to explore this in your own data, I’d love to know what you find. I’ll be looking at this factor as I analyze more categories for future posts.
- Microstock photographers should shoot both.
- Maybe the ideal ad has two people – one looking at the camera to engage the viewer and another to look at the copy to get the viewer to read it
What do you think?
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.
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:
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
There have been a number of great discussions and blog posts lately around stock photography and microstock. There’s a mix of doom and gloom and optimism, but the final verdict is that there’s still a solid opportunity in stock, but that photographers will need to adapt and get smarter and more efficient about their work. There is more competition and more opportunity than ever. I think these statements apply across both macro & micro stock.
Make sure to read the comments on the posts – there are a ton of them and represent a diverse spectrum of opinions.
Ellen Boughn (@ellenboughn) – Success for Stock Photographers
“The vote is in. Based on the many comments on Shannon Fagan’s guest post made by stock industry leaders and photographers, the majority do not believe that the stock business is dead, perhaps sleeping but far from a vegetative state. Millions of dollars are still being generated by the photography licensing business in all models even though to the individuals whose income has decreased by up to 50% it doesn’t seem so. The best time to review the tried and true is when you are searching for the new. Here’s a quick recap of some best practices in stock photography.”
Jack Hollingsworth (@photojack) – I am Stock
“What [does it take] to make money in stock today? It’s deceptively simple. Many will confess. Few will embrace. Raise your game. Pace yourself. Think concepts, not subjects. Stop imitating, start inventing. Research before exposure. Storytell. Learn video. Play to your strengths. Sell direct and through distribution. Be frugal and thrifty in your spending. Focus on diversity. Test the micro waters. Balance speed, volume, yield. Pay attention to RPIs. Think world. Shoot your passions. Have fun.”
Shannon Fagan (@shannonfagan) – What’s your position on Global Positioning? (guest post on Ellen Boughn’s Blog)
“And now I’ll argue, why purchase exclusive RM rights for your client, when the licensing crowd at large is perfectly fine with RF non-exclusivity? Why license premium royalty free when your client can obtain it for low cost or no cost in micro payment? Ask yourself these questions. Your stock agencies are.”
John Lund (@stockphotoguy) – Positive Indicators in Stock Photography
“Yes, being a stock photographer has never been easier; and yes, making a living at it certainly has its challenges. But what business isn’t facing such challenges? The corner grocer has Costco down the street to deal with. The neighborhood coffee shop has Starbucks across the way. We stock photographers just have one hell of a lot of competition, but the possibilities are greater than ever. If we can maintain a positive attitude we are far more likely to find and utilize those possibilities!”
All of the individuals above are insightful, accomplished and have a lot of great things to say about the world of stock photography as a whole.
