DIMdump

Image Idea #18--Extended Families

Next time you attend a family dinner, picnic, church social, or wedding, look closely at the people who are present.  I suspect you will see a broader range of ethnicities, ages, and social relationships than you might initially imagine.  You will see traditional parent-grandparent-child combinations, brother and sisters, and a variety of cousins.  But, you will also see a number of modern innovations and extensions to the concept of "family," that are not well documented or well-represented in stock libraries such as ours.

For instance, it is increasingly common for people to remain friends with their ex-spouse and/or his or her family, following a divorce.  That may mean that the "father" who is giving away the bride could be the legal one, the original one, or the current one (if you know what I mean).  Some people are closer to their ex-in-laws than they are to the blood relative who used to be the connection.  Children seem to circulate freely, among their many step fathers, step mothers, step uncles and step aunts.  Children are also sometimes cared for by half brothers or half sisters.  If the adults in the family have changed partners enough times, it is possible for young people to consider themselves "brother" or "sister" to someone with whom they have no blood relationship, at all.

We seem to be recruiting other types of unrelated people into our extended families.  For instance, I have one friend who has had the same home helper for more than eight years.  Her children consider the woman to be a member of the family.  Why not?  She has been there for them, as long as they can remember.  There is no clear name for her relationship to her family.  She is not a maid, a nanny, or despite the sensationalism around polygamy (as in HBO's "Big Love") a "junior wife."  Most modern families with children, have integrated a variety of supporting adults into their lives.  These can include coaches, teachers, neighbors, and distant relatives.  One would hope and expect these children will return the love and protection they have received, as their "babysitter" ages.

Some older people, who have no one to care for them, hire full time or part time care-giving companions.  These people often develop a relationship that is similar to those the older person had with his or her children.  I have read of several cases where the older person preferred the companion to his or her children--and left his or her estate to the companion.  I believe we will see more and more situations like this, as our fertility drops, our population ages, and the number of seniors who have no children to care for them grows.

Adoption has changed many families.  Overseas adoption scrambles both the look of the holiday table and the genes of the next generation.

One final member of the extended family...pets!  Many people treat their pets as family members.  When my sister goes on a trip, she calls her husband and asks him to hold the phone out so she can "talk to the dogs."  Look at the explosion in clothing, toys, spa treatments and even vacations for pets.

Part of the problem may be a naming issue.  Is the half brother of your half brother (someone you have no genetic relationship with) your "quarter brother" or your "non-brother brother?"  Is the man who cleans your grandfather's house, cooks his meals, and read books to him a "surrogate son," a "nurse," or a "personal assistant?"  None of these terms indicate that the kindness, understanding, and intimacy, of these relationships is more than mere "friendship."

If you have followed some of the links that I sprinkled through this post, you will see that we do not have enough images of this trend in our file.  It has taken stock agencies years to catch up the changes introduced to our society by internationalization, alternate lifestyles and multi-ethnicity.  Those who started working in these areas early, eventually saw huge demand for their work from advertisers and publishers, when they eventually woke up to these trends.

I'd love to see our artists at the forefront of the effort to document and describe the extended family.  As you work with your models, ask them about their families.  Look for relationships that go beyond the traditional.  You will find that many are among the most rewarding and important relationships, in  the lives of your subjects.  If you can capture these human connections with the cold glass your lens, please document them carefully and sensitively in the captions your provide us.  The words may look clumsy, when you write them down, but advertisers and publishers must eventually realize that most of us have an extended family.  They will find out that we care about these family members and that we recommend products to them, buy them things, and think of them when we make plans.  When this news sinks in, there will be a rush to understand the dynamics of these relationships and the influences they bring to buying, lifestyle, and modern thought.

Analysis #32--What Illustration Categories Do Best?

After figuring out that illustrations generate more revenue per image than photographs (see my previous post for details), I decided to examine which illustration categories do best.  From a previous study of Index Stock's 2400 categories and subcategories, I had spotted certain hot spots.  I expected sales by category for illustrations to closely follow the pattern of our overall library.

I was surprised to see some major differences.  (Please note that my review uses only the 11,000 illustrations in our library.  This is a relatively small set of images to study, and this collection does not have the coverage of subjects that our 1,000,000 image general library has.)  In particular, people illustrations didn't do nearly as well as people images in general and concept illustrations were quite low.  Here is a comparison of the ranking of all categories for illustrations and our overall collection.  (I've linked the top fifteen to the relevant images, for your viewing pleasure!)

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Illustration   Rank	Category	Overall Rank
1	Public Service	41
2	Garden	3
3	Couple	43
4	Holiday	61
5	Land Transportation	10
6	Foreign Travel	27
7	Bird	44
8	Environment	59
9	Americana	2
10	Occupation	48
11	Marine Transportation	35
12	Vacation	18
13	Concept	51
14	Business	33
15	Astronomy	62
16	Cat	13
17	Medical Science	36
18	Teenager	19
19	Aviation	21
20	Art	40
21	Zoology	52
22	Social Issue	15
23	Communication	28
24	Education	37
25	Botany	56
26	Flower	39
27	Woman	14
28	People	17
29	Nature &   Scenic	32
30	Miscellaneous	24
31	Shopping	12
32	Food	31
33	Road	6
34	Meteorology	11
35	Child Both	38
36	Industry	60
37	Military	22
38	Abstract	64
39	Baby	49
40	Sport &   Leisure	42
41	Historical	4
42	Religion	58
43	Entertainment	47
44	Child Girl	45
45	Family	53
46	Man	23
47	Fall	54
48	Wedding	50
49	Mature Adult	57
50	Snow Scene	5
51	Architecture	55

Some categories didn't generate any illustration licenses at all, during the period I studied.  They included some fairly popular categories in the overall collection, such as "Crowd," "Farm Animal," "Dog," "Native American," and "Toy & Hobby."  These should probably be target areas for those creating new illustrations.

When I dug down into the subcategory level, I saw a few particularly interesting areas:

Historical women.  We have some great old poster-style images, that are doing well.

Business people, outside office.  Does five times better than business people, inside the office.  Some of the classification on the latter category is suspect--could be part of the reason?

Holiday, fourth of July.  Patriotism always sells well in the U.S.  The Statue of Liberty is another popular illustration topic, but we only have one image to promote.

Nature & Scenic, desert.  Hard to convey the dry landscape of a desert, with a photo.  An illustration can put back in the contrast and colors that the eye sees, and the lens misses.

I've mentioned before that royalty free tends to undercut image pricing in the areas it has penetrated.  There is a concentration of royalty free illustrations in the popular people and concept categories.  This may be why the revenue of these categories is lower than expected.

If you are an illustrator, my information should encourage you.  There are good opportunities to license your work via the rights managed market--or via royalty-free, if that is your direction.  Go for simple images, with a central object or theme that is easily described.  Use lots of color and take advantage of the power of illustration, to exaggerate the subject a bit.  The result is likely to be a high-earning image and the envy of the mere photographers, who share space with you on sites such as ours.

Analysis #31--Do Illustrations Do Well?

One of my readers recently asked me if we want more illustrations.  Of course, my immediate response was an emotional "yes," because I have always LOVED illustrations!  In fact, we changed our name from Index Stock Photography to Index Stock Imagery (back in 1998) because we liked illustrations so much, we didn't want to be "just photos."

We have about 11,000 illustrations on our Index Stock Imagery Web site.  This is a pretty large collection, as illustrations remain relatively rare within the stock image world.  We made them easy to find on our site, by giving our users a special filter that will automatically pick out our illustrations (look for it underneath the search box, on the left side of all of our sites).

Do illustrations license well?  Do they license better than photographs?  To study this question, I looked at our licensing history for the period from November 2004 through October 2005 (our 2005 fiscal year).  I compared the average earnings per image for our illustration collection against the average earnings for our entire 1,000,000 image library.  I used data only on images that were available digitally, during that period, and included both rights managed and royalty free images (about 24% of the images in both our illustrations and photographic collection are royalty free).

 

I was pleased to see that our illustrations generate almost 50% more revenue per image, than an average image.

I have commented before on the fact that relatively few of the images in our collection are licensed each year.  Over time, about 10% of our images get at least one license.  In 2005 alone, about four percent of our collection was licensed.  In contrast, about seven percent of our illustrations were licensed.

Here is one more interesting fact.  Our royalty-free illustrations generated less money than our average image (almost 40% less).  Our rights managed illustrations generated 44% more than average.  (Overall, we are seeing similar per image revenue generation from our rights managed and royalty-free images.  Remember this is revenue per image per year--not revenue per license.  Royalty free images are licensed more often, but at a lower rate, than rights managed images.)

Taken together, this data suggests to me that:

1.  Our customers like illustrations.  They seem more inclined to use an illustration--when one is available--than a photograph.
2.  Customers will look down further in a search, to find an illustration.  As a result, a higher percentage of our illustration file gets seen and licensed, than for our file, overall.
3.  Higher end rights managed customers will pay up to keep control of an illustration.  Lower end royalty free customers probably associate RF illustrations with clip art, and discount their value.

I plan to write further about the relative performance of the different image types and categories in our file.  For the moment, I invite you take a look at our people illustrations.  Aren't they cool!?