Microstock News

Slightly longer than usual since my last news digest - it’s slow on news over the holidays…

Fotolia launched a ‘tax centre’ in their account control panel, all contributors are required to complete tax forms before payments are made. This practice is in line with shutterstock and veer. For individuals in many countries it’s a reasonably simple process of reading some documentation and filling out a form online. Contributors have until January 1 2010 to complete their forms.

Veer introduced 10,000 USD customer protection to images purchased in their marketplace.

Panthermedia reduced their prices more inline with the rest of the microstock industry. It appears that midstocki prices did not work for them(?), the licensing options have also been streamlined which is a good good thing, as they’re still not exactly straight forward (that is not uncommon on sites with subscriptions, credit options and multiple licenses to understand).

imagecatalog quietly passed away in late November, unloved and unnoticed by most.

istock announced (in a well worded release) their 2010 pricing, some significant changes to prices for exclusive photographers images and their vetta collection, plus a changes to their canister levels for contributors. The only thing I object is Kelly’s comment that "Exclusive collection is built on rich, unique imagery unlike anything else out there". Istock certainly have something good in their exclusive contributor base and exclusive collection, and yes those images are unique (you can’t buy them elsewhere), but a quick look through recent istock exclusive uploads reveals some very ordinary images from their exclusives (and some good ones), a good proportion of those exclusive images are very much "like anything else out there". The doubling of prices of exclusive images is probably a good idea, so long as new the search is implemented well. When vetta launched all vetta images appeared first in the search results completely eclipsing the lower priced images, the "problem" with best match was soon corrected to show a better mix of images. Istock have every right to bias search results towards exclusive images so long as the lower quality exclusive images (there are plenty of them!) don’t come ahead of higher quality images or better matches from a non-exclusive contributors, If they do impatient buyers may go elsewhere.

Dreamstime also announced their ‘pay rise’ by announcing their 2010 payment schedule, c/w a comparison of last years prices (thank you DTi). More credits per download for most image sizes and easier to attain level 5 images (50 DL instead of 100 DL).

Fotoila snuck in a change to their 24 months unsold images for 50 cents program, these images are now locked into their free APIi for 5 years instead of the previous 18 months. Tact? More Gordon Brown than Barack Obama I think… comments on MSG. FTi also more publicly announced in a newsletter that new buyers, contributor earnings, credit purchases and photographer payouts were all up by around 50% on 2008 levels, API calls were up 203% (API calls are 3rd party websites and software reselling or searching for licensable images).

Fotolia also cut commission to their contributors by up to 5% (read on it’s not all bad news). Exclusive photographers also took athe same cut and still receive17% more than non-exclusives (in addition to higher sale price per image). Royalties now increase by 3% per fotolia rank i.e. non exclusives now receive 28% after 100 downloads 31% after 1000 instead of the previous 34%, 34% and upwards. This will benefit their well established photographers and penalise the majority of hobbyists. It’s not all bad news as prices have increased (basic images are now $1,3,5 (Xsmall, Small, Medium) instead of the previous $1,2,4 dollars, so all but the smallest images you should see more income.

Clustershot announced that they have partnered with tineye to have all their images indexed. This brings the potential for people seeing your images elsewhere online to search for a place to license them.

NEW YORK, NY, December 22, 2009 – Fotolia is part of a handful of companies that grew during the global recession, and this month, the online image provider celebrates its fifth anniversary. During 2009, the company saw its online library double to over 8,000,000 images and nearly 2 million images were downloaded every month. Since December 2006, membership increased nearly 10-fold, with over 1.5 million people worldwide now signed up to the site.

CEO Oleg Tscheltzoff explains the secret to Fotolia’s success: “Sourcing photos, vectors, and videos that are legal for commercial and promotional use from the most talented artists around the world has enabled Fotolia to provide incredible value. Designers, marketing, and creative professionals traditionally paid upwards of $500 per image in the past. Fotolia offers the same quality and usage rights starting at $1.”

Also contributing to the company’s success is an aggressive geographical expansion plan. Attention has returned to the North American market after success throughout Europe during the company’s initial years. Fotolia hired North American President Patrick Lor and Executive Vice President Garth Johnson, who were instrumental in the development of a major competitor. More recently, Fotolia set up shop in Turkey using its signature localization strategy.

As for where the company is headed, Tscheltzoff says, “As the economy continues to rebound, we will ramp up our global marketing efforts and continue to pursue our geographical expansion plans. Another key area is our video collection - it is the next wave of microstock. There is a real opportunity for contributors to set a precedence in this market and earn a significant income.”

For more information on Fotolia, visit www.fotolia.com

-30-

Over 1.5 million people prefer Fotolia, LLC for affordable, royalty-free photos, vectors, and HD videos. With the introduction of the Infinite Collection, Fotolia became the first worldwide microstock organization to offer both crowd-sourced and professional images on one site. Founded in New York City in 2004, Fotolia spans the globe with websites in 10 languages and offices in 12 countries. With over 8,000,000 images to choose from, find it on Fotolia. www.fotolia.com

Media Contacts:

Jennifer Laraway
Director of Communications, North America
Fotolia, LLC
Direct: 1.403.708.9398
jennifer@fotolia.com
www.fotolia.com
Twitter: fotoliaUSA

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A couple of days ago there was a post on the lookstat blog titled top search keywords for energy, it compared search terms in Google in an attempt to estimate popularity of energy images on microstocki sites. Earlier this year I did something similar in a post about seasonal stock images, and at the time I made the point that I wasn’t exactly sure how well Google search terms related to searches on microstock sites.

So that set me thinking… (yes, be very afraid) Just exactly how much of a match is google trends/adwords data to what people are searching for at microstock sites? Clearly there will be some relationship, but I’d also guess that there are lots of popular terms that will not have a proportionate number of microstock searches. It’s difficult to know how similar the two are. Is it reasonable to assume that popular keywords in Google are more likely to lead to more microstock sales as those keywords make popular subjects hence there will be related businesses in need of such images? As they say "assume makes an ass out of u and me".

Say for example we see that holiday flights is a popular subject in google, we also see that exchange rates is equally popular, for me it’s a stretch to say that images representing exchange rates will sell in the same proportions as ones depicting holiday flights, surely there are too many variables?

 

Another Data Set

I have access to the keywords that people used while browsing a free stock photo site (similar stockxchange but nothing like as big). Of about 1 million searches in 2008 and late 2007 there were some 160,000 unique key phrases searched. The vast majority of them only got one search (just 48k with 2 searches or more). This is just one of the places in microstock we see the ‘long tail / exponential decay graph’, see my post how long images continue to sell and more recently microstock dairies revisited the longtail. A plot of the top 100 is as follows: full table of the data is below, only every 4th keyword would fit on the graph:

 

Graph of search terms vs search volume for top 100 searches.

The keyphrases were sorted as is, so typos, stemming and things like entering the search "cat." or "cats" have not been grouped along with all the other "cat" searches. Likewise the total for "people" does not include a total of times users searched for terms with people in them like "young people" these are listed separately.

 

Comparison

Armed with this data (in the slowest pivot table known to man) I decided to do a bit of analysis to see how these matched the results in the lookstat post:

Left: Google search analysis from the lookstat post and Right: results from the free stock photo site data set.

Looks like they match quite well! Anything below 10 could perhaps be considered error and could easily be skewed by some other factor. I was convinced I was going to be able to prove that energy jobs was popular in Google but not a popular stock search, it seems that way but sadly I don’t think I have a large enough data set to be certain (?).

What’s quite interesting is that only 45 out of a million searches were made for our ‘top’ energy keywords (there were also 6 similar with one search each - "solar energy farm", "solar energy panel" etc) plus many more for single keywords of solar, energy and their related synonyms).

 

The Top 100

For extra comparison, the keywords in my data set look a lot like those top 100 keywords searched on Shutterstock, although I have a definite English language bias, I also have not removed from the top 100 several keywords like ‘nude’ and ’sex’ that are probably not image buyers. Quite a lot more variability in the ordering and plenty of the keywords Shutterstock have in their top 100 only made it into my top 200. 

Rank	Keyword	Frequency	Rank	Keyword	Frequency	Rank	Keyword	Frequency
1	people	18818	34	doctor	2059	67	animals	1455
2	(blank)	16332	35	nude	1998	68	fish	1448
3	music	8971	36	party	1977	69	construction	1422
4	fruit	8922	37	fire	1905	70	flower	1412
5	christmas	7589	38	medical	1887	71	fruits	1410
6	business	5508	39	hands	1880	72	dancing	1379
7	food	5413	40	child	1864	73	cat	1341
8	woman	5008	41	kids	1818	74	rose	1341
9	family	4787	42	tree	1818	75	sky	1327
10	computer	4647	43	education	1798	76	heart	1317
11	children	3731	44	golf	1787	77	home	1306
12	baby	3708	45	sports	1772	78	camera	1284
13	car	3452	46	wine	1758	79	sun	1281
14	dance	3433	47	massage	1745	80	birthday	1254
15	house	3191	48	coffee	1737	81	shopping	1249
16	money	3162	49	hand	1663	82	paper	1243
17	school	3119	50	fashion	1650	83	girls	1235
18	sex	3093	51	earth	1643	84	eye	1217
19	wedding	3058	52	face	1629	85	students	1202
20	book	2977	53	health	1623	86	beauty	1189
21	girl	2845	54	horse	1621	87	world	1177
22	football	2707	55	phone	1597	88	winter	1161
23	women	2611	56	snow	1587	89	pizza	1107
24	beach	2586	57	nature	1587	90	computers	1076
25	water	2510	58	student	1556	91	film	1076
26	apple	2459	59	smile	1549	92	spa	1075
27	love	2406	60	globe	1532	93	law	1066
28	dog	2384	61	hair	1531	94	dogs	1063
29	books	2349	62	fitness	1530	95	chocolate	1049
30	man	2264	63	soccer	1521	96	beer	1027
31	sport	2193	64	guitar	1509	97	tv	1022
32	office	2177	65	flowers	1473	98	space	1020
33	cars	2101	66	sexy	1471	99	cake	995
						100	london	994

Note: "blank" searches are probably either robots, perhaps mistaken users, or users just seeing what an empty search does. Interesting if you run a web site with a photo search then a blank search should most likely not allow you to search, or perhaps return a message with nothing found but ALSO a selection of random or popular images.

Ranked 95 to 99 "chocolate, beer, tv and space cake", sounds like a good night in, lol.

 

Unlucky for some

Heres a few of the 406 terms that had 13 searches each:

baby jesus, voucher, pylon, weed, quebec, ladders, computer chip, emo girl, brussel sprouts, learner driver, woman on phone, lord of the rings, lotto, turf, fashion clothes, sand clock, ghandi, abba, herron, synergy, tofu, hunk, paper plane, miami beach, nylon, andy warhol

Quite an eclectic little bunch and I think this is the first time synergy, tofu and andy warhol have been used in the same sentence. Quite a few of the searches are not what you would call ‘traditional stock subjects’.

 

Conclusion

It seems reasonable that a comparison of relative terms in google trends/adwords will match the relationships between searches on a stock photo site, but I still think that there are a lot of keyphrases for which that is also not the case. I plan to analyse the data some more to see if I can pick out a few obvious "search engine popular" keywords that don’t match image searches. it would be really great if google would let us search their "image search" volume alone. I did previously look at using the google data by combining keywords of interest with the keyword "photos", "images" or "pictures", it works for very popular single word searches but not for most key phrases. We have thus far ignored which images actually sell! see picniche for more about that.

I should be able to set-up something were you can query this data and my more recent 2009 dataset, if anyone is interested?

The Last 30 Days in Microstocki - Bite Sized:

Lookstat added a new ‘collections’ feature which allows you to analyse sales on arbitrary groups of your images, then continued their series of anonymous analytics from their contributors with a very interesting look at portrait v landscape v square images, followed by an analysis of beer v wine stock images and Easter photos. The results rhyme with those from google analtyics found in microstock submission calendar.

iSyndica added reporting of sales for GraphicLeftovers and Vivozoom channels, they now support sales reporting from 23 sites. They have added several new features this month: Choose the size of images syndicated (e.g. highest resolution to only some agencies and only low resolution to your promotional channels) : Custom water marks : mark your uploads as approved or rejected.

Picniche added graphs of historical data to their stock photo demand tool.

Dreamstime announced they were increasing the size of their free collection from a few thousand to "hundreds of thousands". This conveniently followed last months news that they were culling some of the older images from their collection. Those old and unsold images can, at the choice of the contributor, be added to the free section, sent for paid re-keywording or deleted. Some other search and site functionality improvements have also been made at DTi.

Clustershot added stats to their pro accounts allowing you to see where people are finding your photos, encouragingly my stats include not just "customers" I referred to clustershot but also "visitors" from the search engines - noting what I have written before that visitors from search engines are more likely to be doing their homework (literally) than be in the market to buy stock; eyes on images and ‘reach’ from google is still a very good thing to see. I really hope some of the larger agencies implement similar detailed stats of referrals from web sites and searches. cluster shot review

Fotolia launched a Turkish web presence at fotolia.com.tr, Fotolia’s CEO, Oleg Tscheltzoff said “As the number one image provider in Europe, Fotolia is proud to be the first major microstock in Turkey”.

Getty Launched a Call for Artists Group on Flickr, photographers on flickr can submit 10 images for review to the group, good enough submissions will receive an invitation to join Getty and contribute to the flickr collection. We watched as more than 4000 images were added over a 24 hour period, there are at time of writing 57,000 images and 11,000 photographers hoping to catch Getty’s eye. Good luck.

Dreamstime dropped their upload limit to 30 images per day. Leaving users with acceptance rates of 50% to 80% just 6 images. This might be a temporary thing but starts me wondering how long it will be before we start to get bribed by some agencies with "upload more if you also offer the rejects to the free section".

Shutterstock announced that their red carpet program was likely to cover 175 events this year. Launched back in 2007 the "on the red carpet" program allows individual photographers to get the assistance from shutterstock in obtain press passes to special events (concerts, sporting events, festival etc). Logged in shutterstock submitters can access the event application form via their control panel.