LookStat – Official Blog

Summer is just around the corner, from a shoot planning perspective.

Since the time to begin uploading seasonal images seems to be 2-3 months ahead of an event (see our Thanksgiving & Easter posts) and shoots need to happen well before that, we will be profiling the top leisure activities in the USA early. Similar to our hunting post, I’ll be looking at search trends and highlighting the best-selling stock images associated with those activities.

When deciding to post a list of the top activities, the metric you choose to rank on is important. I’ve included the fastest growing as well as those with the highest number of participants in this post. (We looked at the top activities based on consumer spending last week.)

Fastest Growing Leisure Activities in the USA

The chart below shows the ten fastest growing leisure activities in the USA, measured by the % increase in participation from 2007 to 2008 (2009 data is not yet available.) These data are from the National Sporting Goods Association.

Since growth rates by themselves aren’t meaningful, I’ve included a data table which lists the number of participants and the number added from 2007 to 2008. The data are ranked by growth rate and the top activities in terms of participation are highlighted in bold.

• Running didn’t surprise me much since it’s so easy to get started.
• I was a little surprised by the popularity of ‘exercising with equipment’ especially as it is not the same as ‘working out at a club/gym’ as you can see from the table below.
• Snowboarding grew a lot, but off a small base.
• Even though baseball may be ‘America’s pastime,’ soccer had more participants.
• Yoga was bigger and grew faster than baseball or soccer.

Top 10 Leisure Activities Based on Number of Participants in 2008

• I didn’t expect bowling or fishing to be that high on the list (probably my own biases at work.)
• I think age segmentation will be important. For example, I expect the participation in walking to skew older. (I’ll try and address this aspect in the individual sport profiles.)

Stay Tuned (And Share What You’re Interested In)

Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing activity profiles regularly. I’ll be focusing on the fastest-growing list but will leave out winter sports for now since they won’t be of much use from a shoot planning perspective. (If you’d like to see them anyway, let me know.)

As always, if there’s a specific topic you’d like to see covered, please let me know and I’ll see if we can work it in.

After my surprising discovery that hunting was the sport with the highest per participant spend in the USA, I decided that a quick snapshot of the activity and the search results for ‘hunting’ on stock photography and image websites was in order.

Google Insights for ‘Hunting’

To get a sense for seasonality, I checked Google Insights for Search for hunting search trends from 2008 to the present.

There’s a clear seasonal trend that starts in July and peaks in November. From a stock perspective, 2-3 months is the lead time so April/May is when you want to be uploading hunting related images.

Global Monthly Search Volume (in Millions) for ‘Hunting’ via the Adwords Query Tool

As you can see from the chart above, ‘deer hunting’ as a group of two terms (hunting deer & deer hunting) accounts for 2 million monthly searches. Taken together, these two terms are almost three times larger than the search term immediately below them. It’s also instructive to look at the related keywords.

Global Monthly Volume (in Millions) – Related Keywords (via Adwords Query Tool)

It’s useful to look at not just the term itself, but also related terms:

Clearly, ‘rifles’ and ‘outdoors’ are where the action is. One point to note – given that ‘rifle’ is so much more prevalent than ‘rifles’ you may want to consider using the singular form in your title and description. This is because of the fact that those two IPTC fields become the Page Title which is important for SEO.

Show me the Searches

I decided to search a handful of stock photo sites and order the results by downloads (where possible) to see what turned up.

iStockphoto search for ‘hunting’

Fotolia Search for ‘Hunting’

Dreamstime Search for ‘Hunting’

I found it fascinating that both Dreamstime & Fotolia had business shots in their top search results. The keywords in question were related to ‘job hunting.’ I checked a couple of other USA based sites and they all had recreational hunting related imagery on their top search results. I would guess that this is a reflection of a cultural difference. Another interesting thing is that the most download image from Fotolia & Dreamstime is the same one (but almost 6 times as many downloads on Fotolia than on Dreamstime.)

Conclusions & Impact on Stock Shoots

• Hunting, outdoors, rifles, deer – these are your top terms in the USA (for your title & description, ‘rifle’ may be better than ‘rifles’)
• The growth in search volume begins in June. As a result, you should start uploading in March/April
• Don’t fixate on the meaning of a term that’s most familiar or you might miss other interpretations e.g. ‘house-hunting’ or ‘job-hunting.’

I’m planning a series of posts on summer sports and activities (and related keywords etc) to help with your shoot planning.

While doing some background research I came across a couple of very interesting data repositories at the Census & The National Association of Sporting Goods Manufacturers.

I was playing around with the data for consumer spending and participation and decided to run a quick analysis on the average spending per participant for each of the Top 5. The data blew me away.

Top 5 Recreational Pursuits by Spending

NB: Spending & Participation Data in Millions; Source: NSGA

The Fastest Growing of the Top 5? Hunting…

Source: NSGA

Things That Surprised Me

To be honest, almost everything about the data above surprised me. I expected golf to top the total and per person spending charts and I definitely didn’t expect hunting to be on this chart in the first place.

Based on my surprise around hunting & golf, I decided to do a quick search on iStock & Getty Images to see how many results showed up for stock imagery around these subjects. I expected more golf than hunting shots all around.

At iStock, there were 16,576 images returned for a search for ‘golf’ and 6,806 images returned for a search on ‘hunting’. So far so good. I expected to see the same thing at Getty but it was not to be. Getty returns 10,291 results for golf and 12,990 results for hunting. I’m not really sure how to explain the fact that there are more hunting images at Getty but if you have some ideas, please share them in the comments.

Conclusions & Observations

I’m going to have to add hunting to the list of activities that I profile over the next few weeks!

If you believe that how much someone is willing to spend on something is a proxy for how much a marketer will spend to sell them that something, then hunting is clearly an important activity to study.

A Small Request

If you’ve read this far and you found this post interesting, please tweet about it, follow us on twitter, or leave a comment on our blog. In return, I will contact you to get your vote on which activities you’d like to see us profile in our sports/leisure series.

If you help us share our content, the least we can do is make sure we listen when figuring out what to write about next. (Of course, if you just write to me, I will listen anyway, but that is neither here nor there.)

Thanks for reading this far.

Maigi has a great post on Dreamstime which pulls together all of Ellen’s blog posts that she wrote while she worked there. It’s a great resource and although it’s an old post, it was new to me and the advice in there is timeless. Well worth your time.

Article categories include:

• Best Sellers Tips
• Tips & Tricks
• Creativity & Inspiration
• Topics & categories

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.

Ellen Boughn has a great post on her blog about where in the stock photography landscape (the high end or the low end) you should operate. I think this quote sums it up:

You can take the high road or the low. Depending on your work, I suggest traveling both.

I think Ellen’s thesis that middle of the market is a tough place to be makes a lot of sense. I also agree that it’s possible to operate in both the high end and the low end of the market. Jim Collins talks about escaping the ‘tyranny of  OR’ in his book, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.

Instead of being oppressed by the “Tyranny of the OR,” highly visionary companies liberate themselves with the “Genius of the AND”–the ability to embrace both extremes of a number of dimensions at the same time. Instead of choosing between A OR B, they figure out a way to have both A AND B.

You should follow @ellenboughn or subscribe to her blog if you don’t already. Also, I think we should all strive to have our cake and eat it too.

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)

Jonathan Ross has been one of our earliest LookStat users on analytics and was one of our earliest customers on our Back Office services. He has been a pleasure to work with and is always generous with his insight and experience.

RM, RF, Microstock, Video, you name it, Jonathan does it. He’s has been an advocate of operating at every level of the stock industry and we’ve been fortunate to work with him on his microstock endeavors. You can find Jonathan on Twitter – he’s @jonathanjross – follow him. you won’t regret it.

Thanks for the unwavering support Jonathan. We’re excited to be working with you!

I came across a great post by Torchdesigns on Dreamstime which talks about what designers are looking for from stock photography. It’s a great post and well worth your time to read but the summary is they are looking for:

• Something specific
• High quality
• Harmony with the other elements

When I have purchased images for use in presentations, the above points really ring true. For example, in the beer vs. wine post, I wanted images that would look good together and I looked at a ton of beer & wine images before choosing the ones I did.

Torchdesign’s final point can be applied in a wide range of scenarios

Of all of the work that I have done It was always important to have the client in mind when considering the finished product. What does the client want the finished piece to express about them?

No matter what you do, there’s always a client. Keeping him or her in mind raises the ultimate quality of your final product.

(As an aside, I think the harmony point could seed a really interesting search filter idea – not just similar images, but images that might look good together. e.g. if you add one shot isolated on black to a lightbox, maybe show more shots of other subjects on black when searching for different subjects. This would allow you to build a cohesive collection of images for use in a subsequent design.)

Stock photographers should be aware of all licensing options available to them (microstock, macro, direct licensing) and should decide which path or combination thereof makes the most sense for them.

The idea of direct licensing is one that has high mind share among photographers at the moment and most of the conversations I have heard tend to center around the technologies needed. While the technology platform is important, the harder part is having people know you exist. This may surprise you, but “build it and they will come” doesn’t really work. You need to help buyers find you.

It’s All About the Buyers

The goal here is to get people to seek you out. If you become known as the go-to photographer for your niche, then potential customers will seek you out. To do this effectively online, you need to decide what niche you are targeting, identify keywords for that niche and then make sure that your home page reflects those keywords and is SEO optimized.

In addition to SEO on your website, you need to make the most of the social media outlets available to you. These tools are blogs, twitter, facebook, linkedin and countless others. Think contribution – the more you can give to your community in terms of knowledge, advice, input, the more you’ll get back. It’s way better to educate and inform (at least via social media) than it is to drown people in your links.

Branding is a long term goal and like any activity that is fighting entropy, it takes longer to build than to destroy – nurture it. Every trace of you online contributes to your total brand perception.

Rank Highly For Your Niche, Not Just Your Name

No matter how big your brand, I’m close to 100% certain that the group of potential customers who know you will be smaller than the group of customers who have no clue who you are but still want the kind of images you produce. As a result, you have to make sure that your website does a good job of attracting people who are searching for your genre of work, rather than for you. You probably have a vast image library – get those images online and keyword them well. Remember you need to rank highly in searches for your genre, not just for your name.

Now Comes the Easy Part – Licensing Platforms

While you may disagree with me, I would argue that after you have buyers coming to you, the mechanics of technology licensing are relatively easy (thanks to the hard work of the platform vendors.)

I know of three platforms for licensing stock images directly (Clustershot, LicenseStream & PhotoShelter) and I’ve summarized some of the basic features and costs below. I am not an expert on the ins and outs of these systems, I just wanted to put some of the basic features in one place to simplify comparison.

In all cases, you need to remember that you are responsible for:

• Keywording – There’s no escaping this step. If your images are online, you’ll need to add keywords. All the systems below read IPTC/XMP metadata. (we can help with this)

• Legality – You need to ensure you set license types that are appropriate for the releases that you have. For example, if you don’t have a model release for commercial use, don’t sell a commercial license. All of the platform sites push this responsibility onto the photographer.

• Pricing – You can set prices; the platforms do provide guidance, but you have the final say. If you decide to have the platform set a price, make sure you test-drive to ensure things are being set appropriately.

The main advantages of using a licensing platform is that they have investing the time and dollars needed to build a solution for secure hosting, transaction processing, and client delivery of images. Doing this from scratch is messy and you’re way better off focusing on creating images and brand-building.

Stay Tuned

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be creating test accounts and uploading images to get a feel for how the process works. I’ll be documenting what I can and I hope you find it useful. If you have specific questions, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them over the course of my trials.

A Request for Help

If you have experience with any of these platforms, or use others, please let me know and I’ll expand the post. Finally, if I have misrepresented anything or left out critical pieces, again, I’d love to be corrected.