LookStat – Official Blog

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.

We have been working hard over the past few weeks on a free 35-page guide for RM & RF stock photographers who are interested in microstock. Microstock is a growing part of the stock photography market and it’s important to stay informed about it, especially in light of the convergence taking place between micro & RF.

The guide provides an overview of what microstock is and how to get started. It also contains profiles of the top sites, details on their application process, and a submission checklist which covers the latest requirements for creating accounts and uploading and submitting images.

We wrote this to answer a lot of the questions we hear about microstock, especially from established stock photographers interested in adding another revenue stream to their portfolios. I hope you’ll find it a useful and helpful reference.

I know a some of you will know most of this information cold, but hopefully you know someone else that would find it useful. Please help me spread the word about this by tweeting about the guide or sharing it on Facebook.

Thank you for your help and support. As always your comments and feedback are greatly appreciated.

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.

(I knew my Dickens would come in handy at some point.)

As I’ve written about before, microstock and traditional RF stock photography are converging and it’s important for traditional RF stock photographers to test microstock as a channel for their images.

To illustrate this, I decided to license two images. One is from iStock’s Vetta collection and the other is a royalty free image from Getty Images. I think they are both great images and the price points are comparable and that is the point.

Image 1: ‘Elderly Man & Woman on Couch in Nursing Home’ (Getty Images)

I licensed the 506 x 337 px size for $49. The pricing chart for the image is shown below:

One thing to note is that an RF license from Getty is much less restrictive than the base iStock license. There is no limit to the number of print runs from Getty for example. On iStock (as I’ll discuss below) this is not the case.

Image 2: ‘Senior’ (iStockphoto, Vetta Collection)

I licensed the 849 x 565 px sized image for roughly $20 (20 credits.) The pricing chart of this image is shown below:

As I mentioned above, the base license from iStock is much more restrictive in terms of what you can do with it when compared to the RF license from Getty. In order to bring the licenses into parity, you have to add the ‘Unlimited Reproduction’ option shown above. This brings the cost of licensing the image to $320. Essentially, licensing the images for similar purposes at the high end is equivalent in cost. (It’s interesting that the microstock license actually has more usage-based elements built in to it than the traditional RF license)

Conclusions

• Microstock and traditional RF are rapidly converging.
• The images in this post are both terrific and cost roughly the same to license.
• The microstock license has more usage restrictions than the Getty RF license.
• If you have imagery in RF, you should be submitting imagery to microstock.

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.

StockXpert announced on its forum that the site is ceasing operations as of today. The timeline for the wind-down is as follows:

• Feb 2: Uploading & user signup is being suspended; Uploads already in queue will be reviewed until Feb 10.
• Feb 10: Reviewing of Images Stops
• Feb 11: Searching & Downloading of Images Ceases

If you have credits at StockXpert, they will be transferred on a 1 for 1 basis to iStockphoto. Images & footage will not be copied over however. StockXpert will continue to remain live for certain operations and they plan to allow contributors who don’t have iStock accounts to request full payouts. (The post also mentions that contributors will be able to download their portfolios for some period of time.)

This move has been coming since Getty acquired Jupiter. And, as is clear from the screenshot above, Getty will be focusing their resources on iStock & Thinkstock. StockXchng (StockXpert’s free image sister site) will continue operating normally.

One final point of note: StockXpert contributors who opted in to subscriptions will have their images migrated to Thinkstock and they will be visible in the Hemera collection on that site.

The distinction between microstock and royalty free (RF) is becoming irrelevant.

If this seems a little controversial, consider the following:

• Veer announced that it is blending RF & microstock at Veer.com and moving rights managed (RM) imagery to Corbis.
• Getty launched Thinkstock this morning. This is a subscription-only site which integrates imagery from Getty, Jupiter & Istock into one blended set of search results.

Microstock and RF will be blended seamlessly from the buyer’s perspective and image buyers will be given more choice than ever before. Buyers are being presented with images in response to searches and they will buy what works best for them.

Impact on Pricing

What happens to pricing depends on your point of view. I’m optimistic that we’ll start to see pricing get tied to how often images are purchased. This form of pricing is fairly common in microstock today; all images start off at the same level and popular images go up in price. As a result:

• The best performing images earn the most.
• The lower prices of newer images ensures that they don’t get completely buried by the best-sellers. As they sell, they move up the earnings ladder.

If anything similar to this is implemented in the blended sites, prices for popular images will go up whether they began life with the ‘microstock’ or the ‘RF’ label. Conversely, images that don’t sell well will not benefit.

Ultimately, the impact on pricing is likely to be mixed, and your background in stock photography will influence how you feel about pricing. If you started in microstock, the pricing trend has been upwards. If your background is in RM/RF, then ‘upwards’ is probably not the first word that comes to mind.

Still, the market is what it is, and your choices remain the same: do nothing, adapt, or leave. I think there is still opportunity but it won’t involve doing what worked in the past.

What About Rights Managed?

There continues to be a place in the market for RM imagery, but this won’t be limited to traditional agencies. It would be easy for a site like iStock or Fotolia to implement RM licensing across their entire collections. As more traditional image buyers begin to explore self-service online channels for stock photography, it’s inevitable that sites will evolve to accommodate their requirements. This doesn’t mean a decline in pricing – images, that are in demand, unique, and hard to replicate, will always command a premium. The more likely scenario is a continued evolution towards a single stock photography licensing storefront. (Whether that is a million small storefronts integrated by Google or an individual stock photography site remains to be seen.)

Implications for Stock Photographers

• The distinction between microstock and RF is not meaningful.
• Evaluate and test your distribution options (direct, RM, Micro/RF) to find which ones work for you.
• Microstock is now a viable way to get your images in front of RM/RF buyers.

Further Reading

• Ellen Boughn – Where do you fit in Phototown?
• Paul Melcher - The New End
• Fast Media Magazine – Veer Calling Time on RF

A Parting Thought

If Thinkstock updates it’s collection every week, I think the iStock portion of the collection is going to grow the fastest. I think the same will be true at Veer and the images submitted through Veer Marketplace. It’ll be interesting to see how the editing strategies evolve to manage this aspect of their sites.