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.

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.

Which of Title, Description & Keywords matter for search? The short answer is:

“All of them”

Here’s why.

As you can see from the table above, all of the fields have a role to play in either the Page Title or a site’s search. As a result, so you need to make sure that they all contain the top keywords for your image.

Page Title Tag
This is the sentence that shows in the top of your browser when viewing a web page. If you view the source of a web page, it is the <Title> element

The  Page Title Tag is the most important on-page factor from a search crawler’s perspective. As a result, the words in your title tag are crucial for searches on Google and other search engines. Three of the four sites above use the IPTC title for their browser title tag and Shutterstock uses the description. So, regardless of what you think of them, those fields matter a lot. Even though iStock, Shutterstock and Fotolia ignore everything but the keywords in their search results, the fact that Google cares means you need to care.

Oh, one more thing – Dreamstime and Fotolia both have a character limit and truncate inputs. So, the bottom line? You have 50 characters in which to be relevant. Put your most important terms up front.

On-site Search
As you can see from the table, the microstock sites use some or all of the meta data fields in their search algorithms. I think we are all sold on the value of keywords, even for on-site search but Title & Description also have an important role to play. In fact, at Dreamstime, I think an exact match on title gets you the highest placement in search results (even above keywords.) I was able to get searches to return for words that only existed in the IPTC Title.

Talk is Cheap – Show Me the Searches!
All this becomes very clear with a few examples. I did a search on istock for ‘friendship’ and I picked the image highlighted below.

The title tag for this image is: “Two Women having Fun Outdoor (XXXL).” If you search google images for “two women fun outdoors”, this image is the second result. (This is a good thing.)

If you search iStock for “two women fun outdoors” the image is nowhere to be seen. While it has ‘fun’ in its keywords, it doesn’t have “two women.” And if you search for images on Google with keywords like ‘friendship’ you are not going to find that image.

Conclusions

• Title, Description & Keywords should all contain relevant terms
• Your page titles matter more than you think – for on site & for Google search; don’t ignore them
• You have 50 characters for the title – make them count; put important keywords first

As part of our Back Office Services, we pay attention to these items. You should too.

Given that Valentine’s Day is around the corner and I’ve already posted about Easter, I thought I would take a look at the other upcoming holidays. As part of this research, I found some fascinating stats on on number of greeting cards sent by occasion at Hallmark.com. I’ve added the table below.

I was a little surprised to see Mother’s Day so high on the list. The fact that 50% more cards are sent on Mother’s Day vs. Father’s day is interesting as well. Also, according to Hallmark’s page on Mother’s Day, this is the largest card-sending holiday for the Hispanic community. As a quick test, I did a search on iStock for ‘Mother’s Day’ and sort by downloads – three of the top 5 images have ‘Latin American & Hispanic Ethnicity’ in their keywords.

iStock – Ordered by Downloads

I also thought it would be interesting to take a look at the first row of results that get returned on the default search sort order from iStock, Getty, Corbis & Flickr

Corbis – Best Match

Flickr – Relevance

Getty Images – Default Sort

iStockphoto – Best Match

In general, there’s a similar feel to the stock images but Flickr stands out with the dominance of floral shots in the top search results. Not sure what to make of that pattern but I wouldn’t recommend shooting more flowers. The agencies have more than enough of those.

In terms of what wasn’t there, I was a little surprised not to see more ‘breakfast in bed’ and ‘mum chilling out’ type shots. Another odd thing to me was that there were virtually no men in any of the shots. Given than 2007 was a peak in US history for new births, I thought I’d see more ‘young mother & husband & baby’ images.

Things to Note

• Mother’s Day in the USA is Sunday, May 9th in 2010 (if seasonal microstock trends hold, then 2-3 months before is the time to start uploading)
• Gifts, cards, brunch & flowers are the top related search keywords

I’d love to hear your perspectives on what has and hasn’t worked in your mother’s day shots. In any case, I’m going to make sure I don’t short change my Dad this year.

It’s not stock photography, but Mashable has an interesting post about profile pics and dating responses on OKCupid. The post is about profile pics and stats; the results will probably surprise you.

The myths:

• It’s Better to Smile
• Phone & Webcam Photos are Creepy
• Leave Something to the Imagination
• Let them see you face

As always, pay attention to the numbers!

Also, here’s the the original post on OKCupid (nice work & great post!)

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