DIMdump

Searching for Truth #12--An Interesting Alphabet

We recently sent an email to our customers telling them about some of the great new images that we added to our subscription products.  To make our promotion a bit more interesting, we gave an example of a new image to match each of the 26 letters in the alphabet.

We emailed this promotion first to our Photos To Go Unlimited users.  These subscribers get access to 85,000 professional images at a 2MB size.  Most of our Photos To Go Unlimited customers are Web designers, small businesspeople, or "road warriors."

We then emailed our Index Open users.  These subscribers use high resolution versions of the same images that our Photos To Go Unlimited users see, to create advertisements, brochures, and editorial pieces.

The result was a great open rate (the number of people who saw our email an opened it / the total number of people we emails)--about double the normal for both products.  We also saw a high level of click through on the links to the new images.  I was interested to see both which links were most popular and if there was any difference between the behavior of the lower end and higher end users.

Here are the raw click through rankings for the two products (1 = the most click throughs, 2 = second highest, etc.):

The top entry is the letter "A."  I don't attribute this to intense interest in "Anatomy."  Rather, I think it is human nature to start a list like this at the top, just as we start reading a newpaper or magazine at the front.  Of course, we generally decide to skip ahead to the "good stuff," as did the viewers of these emails.

Note that both sets of viewers had "kiss" as their second-most-clicked on link.  I have always felt that words like this, that incorporate both action and concept values, are very compelling.  "Young Adult' as number three for both products reflects the heavy use of young people in all types of creative materials (they are such a desireable market to appeal to) and the fact that many of the users of our products are young (and interested in "themselves").  "Nature" is also a common choice, at number four.  I think that subscription buyers are particularly comfortable with looking to these products as a source of backgrounds and "rest images" for their work.

We diverge suddenly and sharply between entries 5 and 7 (although both groups had a "bird" selection in here, that probably was due to the "read from the front" syndrome, I mentioned above).  Our Index Open users were more interested in "jewelry" and "computers."  These are business subjects and include images that are handy for illustrating sell sheets, retail brochures, and office-related marketing materials.  Our Photos To Go Unlimited users wanted to look at "question mark" and "laughing."  Both are quirkier subjects, with less practical use.  They support the idea that these lower end users have more time and interest in experimentation and brainstorming, than their more project-focused high end counterparts.

At the bottom of the list for both groups were the animals.  "Giraffes," "zebras," and "ostriches" may be cute or exotic, but they don't fit easily into many projects.  Note though, that every word in the alphabet got some click through interest.  It seems our subscription customers want to see new images as soon as they are available.  This hunger for new material is a good sign for those images suppliers who participate in the subscription market.

Searching for Truth #11--Have We Saturated the Market?

The library of my agency (Index Stock), passed the one million image mark, late last year.  At the time, it seemed a momentus occasion, well worth celebrating.  After all, I recall when we put our first image on line (1992) and when we passed the 10,000 image mark (1993).  I believe we hit 100,000 in 1996, so it took nine more years to add another zero to our image count!

I've recently read and seen announcements of stunning rates of image growth, from other players in the image distribution area.  These didn't reduce my pride in our achievement, but they did make me wonder about how much value we would create by adding our next one million images.  Have we reached the point as an industry, where we have saturated our market?

I did a simple study of seven major image distribution sites.  I searched for eight terms on each site, and recorded how many images each site claimed for that term.  Take a look at the results:

 

There is a little overlap between these sites.  For instance, some of the images that are on the Getty Images' site are also on our site.  Some of our images are on the PictureQuest and Alamy sites, and some artists may contribute the same images to iStockPhoto, Shutterstock, Alamy, and/or Flickr.  However, even with a 10% deduction for overlap, the number of images available on these and most other subjects is overwhelming.  How can any potential user of images carefull review and consider more than 3,000,000 people images?  How would someone who was looking for a man shaking hands or a good shot of Paris, wade through 8,000 manly handshakes and 800,000 bistros and Eiffel Towers, without falling asleep!

I've only included seven sites on my list.  There are hundreds of other good collections.  For instance, our good friends at Design Pics in Canada, have 13,430 great people images.  Our U.S. based contributors at VStock have 2,955 brand new people shots.  Our industry probably has created more than 5,000,000 people images--and maybe has 10,000,000.

Notice also that even subjects as mundane as "toothpick," return more than 3,000 images.  Exotic subjects are also heavily covered.  The "puffin" is a cute seabird that lives in Iceland.  There are more than 6,000 images of this odd bird, just on these seven sites.  I doubt I could find any concept, race, place, animal, or thing for which there are not now at least 1,000 images available, commercially.

Alamy announced that it added more than 100,000 images in the past quarter.  Shutterstock has gone from a few thousand images to almost 1,000,000 in two years.  Major consumer photo-sharing sites such as Snapfish, dotPhoto (recently renamed Exclaim!), and Webshots, are adding hundreds of thousands of images to their sites, every day.  A search for "people" on Google Images returns 4,560,000 of them.

In my humble opinion, I feel the above is proof that we have saturated the commercial image market.  Is this a good thing or a bad one?  I found a nice article on Sticky-Marketing.net that I think describes the potential downside of saturation.  The article points out:

1. Once a market reaches saturation, customers stop buying new images and are only trying to replace ones that have gotten old or overused.  This leads to a drop in volume.
2. Competition heats up, as providers realize there are relatively few new potential buyers to serve.
3. Some sellers will try to convince customers that the products offered by other suppliers are obsolete or poor quality.  There creates a shift from selling the positives of one's own product, to pointing out the negatives of the products from competitors.

Saying the market is saturated is not the same thing as saying images are a commodity.  There are still huge differences between the quality of the images on each site and the accuracy of the keywording that produces these searche results.   However, saturation can lead to commodity-type behavior, quite quickly.  At present, I think many customers can tell the difference between what they get from a site like ours, and what they get from searching on a site that does not have solid editing and controls over how images are "tagged."  However, those differences can be eroded over time by technology that ranking systems that push up the better images, and software that automatically improves or adjusts keywording.

I see no simple solution or magic strategy, for escaping from these issues.  Index Stock will try to post new fresh images on its sites, so we can capture our share of the "replacement" market.  We will continue to look for (and probably find) new customers and new market segments.  And, we will refrain from focusing on the negatives of competing products and focus on our own positive aspects.  Unfortunately, I suspect that other players in the image licensing market will find it hard to do the same.

Searching for Truth #10--Organic Search Traffic

When I want clear explanations of technical stuff, I often turn to Wikipedia.  It defines Organic Search as: "a process by which World Wide Web users find web sites having unpaid search engine listings, as opposed to using the pay per click advertisement listings displayed among the search results."  When you go to a search engine such as Google or Yahoo! and perform a search, you will see the "organic" results surrounded by "paid" results.  Many companies are spending huge amounts, to put their message into these paid ad locations.  Most (including the company I work for, Index Stock) are also spending time and effort to get a top ranking in the organic results.

Thanks to this hard work and the good "content" we offer, Index Stock's various Web sites get hundreds of thousands of "organic search" visits, each month.   Rather than offering my ideas on how to tune a site to get more of these visits (a process known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO), I thought I'd tell you a little about the search phrases that seem to bring people to us.   To do this, I looked at what keywords led visitors to our core www.indexstock.com site, during the first half of 2006.

Our visitors came via more than 10,000 different search terms, during this period.  (There are also thousands of non-search sites that link to us and send us traffic--a part of the traffic-building story that I may talk about on another occasion.)  I decided to study only the top 150 organic search terms, since these accounted for more than 80% of all of our search engine-originated traffic.

The most common search terms were also the easiest to guess.  About 40% of our search visitors had entered a phrase such as "stock photography," "stock photos," "stock images," "royalty free photos," or "free photos."  The first three of these alone accounted for about 30% of all search-origin visits.  I counted 40 generic terms for stock photography, in the top 150.  Some of the less frequent ones were things like "stock de fotos" (we probably should provide foreign-language descriptions of our site, to make it easier for foreign searchers to find us), "stock photo search" and "photo subscription."

The next most common terms related to our name.  Yes, it seems about 35% of the folks who came to us via major search engines knew (or thought they knew) our name, but not the URL of our Web site.  A few (about a third of these visitors) got our name right (we respond to either "Index Stock" or "Index Stock Imagery").  The rest tried a number of creative alternatives such as: "Index Images," "Index Photos," "Image Index," Indexstock Imagery," and "Index Stock.com."  Given the trouble I've had my whole life with my own name (which seems hard for just about everyone I meet to understand, pronounce, and spell!) I wonder if we should change our name to something even simpler (along the same lines, several people have suggested that I give up and just change my name to "Bob").  We may also need to embed name variants in our pages, to make it easier for the search engines to connect our page with what our spelling-challenged and memory-inhibited visitors are looking for.

Third on the list at about 10% of our organic traffic, are people who are looking for a specific artist.  I was pleased to see that more than 60 of our artists were included the top 150 search terms.  This suggests to me that our customers are interested in the individuals whose work is the foundation of our success.  We seem to be building a pleasant synergy with our artists, that combines our marketing power with their personal fame and reputation.  The special portfolio page we build for each artist (http://www.indexstock.com/content/artists/artists.asp) and an advanced search that makes it easy to find each artist's images, contribute to this traffic.

About 0.3% of our visitors got to us by asking what sites are similar to those of one of our major competitors.  I like that, because it says that at least some people out there want to see fresh images and new choices.  We subscribe to the view that is unethical to use our competitors' names on our site.  Otherwise, we could probably spoof and spam a lot more of their visitors, to come to us.

Only a tiny sliver of visitors were looking for what I expected to see--specific topics.  While there was one off-color cluster of searches ("arab gay photos") and a few mundane pro photographer-related items ("photo model" and "photo release"), most highly specific search term items are buried far down in our search stream.  That may change as we continue to expose more of the meta data in our images to search engines.

Searching for Truth #9--Concept Word Use

In my last post, I listed some concept words that are frequently used to describe the images in our library (Index Stock now has more than 1,000,000 images!).  I also gave some words that are infrequently used.

It would be natural to think that there is more opportunity to make money, with the popular words.  After all, that seems to be where the "traffic" is.  Alternately, an artist could produce images to cover the words that don't have many images, yet.  Then, if a customer enters that word, the artist would have a high chance of having her or his image seen.

Rather than guessing, I thought I'd look to see what image licensing statistics show.  I added up the licenses for each image in our database that had a concept keyword attached.  I then plotted the range of earnings per image against the frequency of use of each keyword, in our library.  I expected to see a pattern that showed higher earnings for "rare" keywords--those that had few images associated with them.  Instead, the spread looks pretty random.  When there are just a few images for a keyword, there is a lot of variation in earnings--one large sale for a single image can skew the results up and a few images that don't license at all, can skew the results down.

Looking at individual words only helped a little.  Here are the top twenty earning words, on an earnings per image basis:

Frigid	Insomnia
Neat	Eager
Virtuous	Message in a Bottle
Solidarity	Invigorating
Longing	Stamina
Ferocious	Inspire
Expensive	Modesty
Corporate Ladder	Animosity
Adrift	On the Prowl
Dreary	Evolution

It is easy to understand why "Corporate Ladder" or "Inspire" could garner some nice licenses, but why did "Adrift" and "Frigid" do well?

Here are the twenty worst-earning concept keywords:

Tease	Peculiar
Momentum	Zen
Biodiversity	Temporary
Superstitious	Brazen
Alternative-Lifestyle	Fair Play
Authority	Participation
Sorrow	Fad
Parallel	Surfing the Internet
Staring	Long
Stubborn	Suicide

Again, I understand that "Staring" may not be a popular concept, but I know we are hounded by clients to get more "Alternate Lifestyle" images--and "Surfing the Internet" should be a hot category.

So, after looking at data on hundreds of keywords and tens of thousands of images, I am stuck with an ambiguous result.  I will have to get my satisfaction from asserting that the data shows how important the quality of an individual image is.  The difference between a high-earning keyword and a low-earning one, may be driven by the presence of a single, high-earning image.  If I'm right, our ability to deliver a great pair of insomnia images (see below, from two different artists!), is what drives good sales for a given concept.

Howard Sokol

Katie Deits

Searching for Truth #8--Concept Word Distribution

A stock photo agency like Index Stock (my agency), uses hundreds of concept words to describe its images.  In turn, our customers use these words, when they search.  (By the way, customers think that they are constantly using concept words--that they are vital.  But, they actually use them relatively rarely.  The highest-use concept word is "happy," and it rarely ranks above number 50, on any given day!  This is another example of the split between how people think they use a search engine, and how they really use it.)

The classic concept words are emotions and feelings (love, hate, anger) and moral states (right, wrong, justice).  However, we have had to introduce many other concept words, to help our customers find the right image for their need.

Here are the concept words that we most-frequently use, to describe the images in our collection:

Leisure	Colorful
Fun	Childhood
Togetherness	Healthy
Happiness	Style
Beauty	Cute
Pleasure	Enjoyment
Bonding	Generations
Festive	Many
Agility	Discipline
Love	Modern
Americana	Competition
Relaxation	Skill
Vitality

While there are a couple of emotion words (pleasure and love), a big chunk of these most-used words are "lifestyle" concepts.  They help our users sort through the hundreds of thousands of images we have of people, doing things.  These words let them quickly zoom in on situations where people are relaxing, senors are energetic or "vital," a couple feels close and exhibits "togetherness," etc.

What concept words show up only rarely?  Here are some examples:

Compromise	Savagery
Distinct	Temporary
Peculiar	Modesty
Starvation	Cheat
Corruption	HeadStart
FairPlay	Momentum
Ignorance	Impolite
Sensational	Reliability
Considerate	Nobility
Turbulence	Suicide
Brazen	Biodiversity
Zen	Envy
Superiority

It is probably OK that we don't have a lot of concept images to match keywords like "brazen" and "nobility."  I can imagine a client using these words, but not very often.

However, some of the other words on this list deserve more attention.  "Reliability" is hard to express in image terms, but it is something many advertisers would like to communicate about their products.  "Biodiversity" and "Zen" are New Age items that should be popular concepts on which to hook an ad theme.  "Starvation," "Corruption," and "Suicide" are social issues that many editorial users need to describe.  "Envy," "Considerate," and "Modesty" describe important interpersonal relationship issues.

Of course, there is no guarantee that a new image with a rare "Envy" keyword will snag more licenses than one with a more common "Love" or "Skill" keyword.  In my next blog, I will look at the money side of concept words, and which seem to earn the best return for our artists, per image.

Searching for Truth #8--Wisdom from my Mom

Twenty-plus years ago, I was the publisher of a small newspaper.  My mother was one of my few regular readers, and a kind and supportive one.

We corresponded the way folks did back then--by letter and telephone.  Something she wrote struck me as important enough, that I decided to share it, with my readers.  I was cleaning out some boxes recently, and happened to find a copy of the article.  I thought it might be worth sharing again, with this audience.

A Little Maternal Wisdom

"I am concious more now that my life is half over [at a conservative estimate], that it isn't much use being here if one doesn't have time to appreciate it--relish all thelovely things that happen, and generally make the most of what may be the only life one has, and almost certainly, the only one the person in this life will be aware of."  --Joanna Gidwani

I received this advice in a letter from my mother in April.  As I read it, I began to think about whether or not I was making the best of "the only life" I have.

My mother might have been expressing a concern about whether the time I was spending on my job was the best thing I could do to advance my career.  She might have been cautioning me against becoming so committed to my work and to success that I would forget about the "people" side of my job.  There is certainly a lot of room for improving the happiness, comfort, and quality of life of both the workers in my company and the people who are served by its product.

I don't think however, that my mother wanted me to take such a long-range and altruistic view of the usefulness of my life.  I think instead, with maternal love, she was giving me advice that I concentrate on the things that were happening to me personally, every day.

There is enjoyment to be found in walking to the train each morning and in walking back through the same blocks again, in the evening.

There is satisfaction wrapped into the friendships I have developed with the people I have met over the years.

There is beauty to be found in the faces around me, in the books I read, or in the symmetry of a balance sheet and the interrelationships between the people on our organizational chart.

These pleasures are around me every day, in abundance.  To experience them, I only need to take out from the pressure of work and the daily responsibility of an adult life.

Summer is here, with its picnics and vacations.  We will all have a chance to think about what we are going to do and where we are going to do it.  I urge you to follow my mother's advice and take a break from your career.  Open yourself again to the simple pleasures of being alive.  Those pleasures will be with you to be enjoyed throughout your life, no matter what path your career takes.

PS:  My mother died at the early age of 66, but enjoyed those years, more than anyone else I know.

Searching for Truth #7--More Live Search String Data

Had a chance over the past two weeks to pore over our search logs.  Our stock photography archive at Index Stock is searched tens thousands of times each day by thousands of people.  That means we have a virtual avalance of data about what people are trying to find, when they visit us.

The most striking thing to me is always how diverse our customer needs are.  Over a recent two day period, we saw more than 9,000 different requests.  Of these, we were able to satisfy 90% with at least one image--a satisfying result.  Those we couldn't handle included requests like "Crawdad festival and Breaux" (we have crawfish, but no images of this festival), "daimand" (we correct 40,000 spelling errors, but our talented customers keep finding new ones, like this variant on "diamond"), "mrhfkuti" (I thought this might be a Pokeman character, but after checking the Web, I'd guess one of our clients fell asleep and leaned on his or her keyboard!), and "senior and couple and unhappy" (I find an image #563965 for this...so I'm not sure why the client got a zero result).

The top 90 of these requests (the top 1%) accounted for just under 10% of all requests.  As usual, the top 20% only covered 41% of all requests (no 80-20 rule here).  (FYI, the last string in the top 20% was the classic, "golf ball in grass.")  More than 85% of the 9,000 requests were unique and only occurred once.  57% of the requests were for a single word.  (So much for emphasizing and promoting fancy Boolean logic!)

Here is a list of the top 30 requests.

people business bare body man woman flowers animals flower sky family abstract backgrounds globe car backgrounds children water rose beach computer tree money office food soccer medical sun phone india golf man dog

Notice that there is one odd one item on the list--"bare body man."  No matter what period I search, I almost always see one request that is unique to that time.  I've done my rankings based on "sessions."  So either someone was dogged enough to log into our site numerous times to do the same request or a number of people within a group or organization were all working on the same project.  (Of course, it could have been one of our site testers, doing some kind of stress test.  We sometimes consume as much as 5% of our site capacity with our internal monitoring tests and tracking stuff.)

I separately track the "advanced" queries.  We have three ways of doing advanced searching on our site:  Boolean logic (via the Advanced Search link), Narrow Search (by putting in a term after an initial search, a user can narrow things down quickly), and our Idea Helper (the Idea Helper suggests words to include or exclude in a search, that may be useful or interesting).  We find that a lot of people use Narrow and Idea Helper, but only about 5% of our users try Advanced Search.  The most common type of Advanced Search seems to be the "But Not."  A lot of users want to see all of something ("dogs") but without a set of things that might seem related ("people').  They can get this also with Idea Helper, but only if the keyword they want to exclude is something commonly available.  Here is a real example:  "Children<or>Sick<and><not>adult<and>age 6 to 9 years<and><not>beach."  The easy way to do this is to start with "chidren sick" which will give an "or search" of those terms, and then use Idea Helper to refine things.  If you do it right, you will see 81 images.  (I can't link to the result because it is too complicated, but #636915 is the first image that appears.)

Another fun thing to look at is artist popularity.  Every enlarged thumbnail has the contributing artist's name underneath it, with an active link.  The link generates a search for ALL of that artists images.  If someone likes an image enough to enlarge it and then likes it even more when it is bigger, it is natural to click on the artist name link, and see other work by the same artist.  Think of these clicks as "votes," and you have a simple way of measuring who is most popular on our site.

I'm pleased to say that the votes are widely spread.  Over the two day period I was looking at, 387 different artists got these "votes."  The winners were these folks:

Boost Stock Photography Chris Simpson Rubber Ball Productions Bill Whelan Ed Langan Image Source Ron Brown Hill Creek Pictures Dave Rusk Thinkstock Photolibrary Walter Bibikow Terry Why Omni Photo

Note that there is a bias in the way I've counted things, towards folks who have a lot of images on our site.  That is one reason that several of our major RF suppliers are on this list.  However, these providers are also doing great work--worthy of praise and study.  Please take a look and see what our other visitors saw, when they clicked on these links.

I'd love more questions on searching, if you have them.  There are certainly a lot of things within search, to ask questions about!

Searching for Truth #6--Some Recent EMail

One thing I enjoy about my job, is that I get a lot of email.  (I will probably get a lot of email about this comment--most of it pointing out that I must be sick to feel this way!)  With 50+ employees, 1600 artists, 100+ distribution partners, and more than 200,000 customers, there seems to always be someone who has something interesting to say.  Plus, I get the normal smattering of newsletters and ideas from friends and family.

(By the way, this article from Emaillabs suggests that an average American is currently getting about 20,000 emails per year.  That is about 55 emails per day.  In comparison, I am getting about 500, plus around another 1,000 spam emails.)

I thought I'd share emails that touch two topics I get asked about, often--why don't we use more keywords and what should a new young artist do, re the stock business.  (FYI, I asked permission to reprint these, along with my response.)

TOPIC 1--WHY DON'T YOU USE MORE KEYWORDS?

Dear Bahar,

I have read your articles on dimdump with interest.  One thing I have to say about the Index Site is that the Key Wording is very minimal.

There are not enough Key Words to keep the search down to a reasonable number of images the buyer is willing to look at.I think the Key Wording should be expanded.

Also I think it takes too long to get a response after I suggest additional Key Words to new images put up on the site.

With regards,

Thomas Winz

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(Thomas is a great concept shooter, among other things.  One of his images is currently featured on our home page rotation.  Click on his name above to see all of the images he has with us and click here to see the one we are currently featuring.)

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Dear Thomas,

Thanks for the feedback.  Keywording is one of my passions, as it has a huge effect on search quality and on our ability to deliver the "right" image to our customer.

You are right that we use fewer keywords than our competitors.  There are several reasons for this:

1.  Our research shows that our visitors use a very narrow range of keywords.  I suppose this relates to the general collapse of the English language into a smaller and smaller vocabulary.  (Try using any word of more than three syllables in general conversation!)  More than 90% of the searches we receive are composed of one or more of about 10,000 words.  There is no reason to make keywording more difficult and time consuming by expanding the number of keywords, if no one will ever use the extra words.

2.  Many of our competitors "expand" their entries, by adding variants of the basic words.  Instead, we analyze the search request and reduce it to match our keyword set.  For instance, we process "happier," "happiness," and "happy" to the "stem" of "happy."  We transform "USA," "US," and "United States" to the "stem" of "United States of America."  This allows one keyword on an image to match many different entered terms.

3.  We search both keywords and captions.  Therefore, we leave truly unique descriptors for our images, in the caption.  These would include a person's name, a specific place name, a scientific name for an animal, etc.  A match on one of these caption terms is given very large weight in our search engine.

4.  Many of our images have very similar content.  We have a lot of people playing with their children.  No amount of additional keyword entry on the tiny differences in the images would help the average searcher.  Instead, we find that most enter broad generic terms (the single word "people" is our most popular search) and then page through hundreds and in some cases, thousands of images.  In a sense, our keywording effort is often wasted.

If you suggest a keyword, we go through a reasonably rigorous process, as follows:

1.  We look to see if we already have a closely related "stem."  If we do, we attach your suggestion to that word.

2.  We look to see if the word has general use.  For instance, has it been requested/used by searchers on our site, in the recent past?  We do not want to add words that are too narrow.

3.  We make sure that we have at least five images from at least two different photographers, that would deserve the proposed word.  If we don't, we will not provide our user with the image and style range that he/she has come to expect.

Even so, we try to make keyword additions regularly and you should see any accepted words go live on our site within a month of your suggestion.  Can you send me an example of some past suggestions, so I can investigate further?  Unfortunately, in my experience, no business system remains functional, without constant supervision.

Bahar
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TOPIC 2--COULD YOU LOOK AT THIS BRIGHT YOUNG ARTIST AND TELL ME IF HE (OR SHE) SHOULD TRY TO GET INTO STOCK?

(This email is from one of my cousins, who used to be a top publishing executive.  She and her husband have retired and now tour around the country in a mobile home--teaching other people how to convert their lives into mobile mode.  Their book, First We Quit Our Jobs : How One Work Driven Couple Got on the Road to a New Life, is both informative, well-written, and hilarious.  I highly recommend it to anyone who is thinking about this approach to life.)

Hi Bahar --
I'm just going through the website, www.avikennyphotography.com,  of a young
(16 year old) fellow we know and wondered what your professional opinion of his work is.

Hope you and your wife are well and have a happy '05.  And, that we get to see each other!

Regards,
Marilyn
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Dear Marilyn,

His work is pretty good.

Best part is his bird work.  Hard to get clear exposure and color.  He has captured the expressions on the birds well.

Flowers are also good.  Fly in the macro section would be great, if it was all in focus.  Water drop has a reflection, but is the right idea.

So, per his work as art--photography, pretty good.  Per his work as art--business potential, it is weaker.  Biggest reason is that the biggest opportunity is in people and lifestyle stuff.  We do license landscapes and animals and flowers...but he is facing more competition there and the prices are lower.  (More competition, because so many people do it and have done it so long!  For every country he can get to, there are people 50 years old who have been there ten times and covered every subject they can think of.)

Here are his choices (as I know them):

1.  Try to see if a commercial stock agency will agree to represent him.  He should probably follow this path, no matter what.  No harm done, if they reject him.  Some nice earnings opportunity if they accept him.  Plus, an agency will probably only want 1% to 5% of his images, so he will retain his other options.
2.  Look for publishing opportunities, on his own.  There are a number of newsletters and lists circulated, that he can look at.  The problem is that most of the prices are low and some of the "buyers" are not 100% ethical.  He may find his work was used, without payment, and have to go through the hassles of trying to collect.  The best options are probably calendar companies, greeting card companies, etc.  They don't pay much, but the bigger ones have whole staffs devoted to looking at potential contributor images.
3.  Build his own on-line gallery and start selling posters.  Again, this option shouldn't be excluded by the others.  One easy place to go is www.art.com.  We have a gallery there and I can testify that they generate good traffic for material like his.  I think it would only cost $100 or so, to set up the site.  More work for him than having someone else do it, and no guarantee of a profit.  But, it is a way to test the water and see where things might head.

Hope this is helpful.  If he'd like his "portfolio" reviewed by us, well, you have an "in."  Have him email me and I'll forward it to an editor for evaluation.

Bahar

Searching for Truth #5--Editorial vs Advertising vs Foreign

People often refer to someone as an “editorial” shooter, or say that a set of images would be good for “advertising use.”  In fact there are three main branches of use within an agency such as mine, Index Stock.  One is with what we call “editorial” customers—those who use images for book, newspapers, magazine stories, and other products that educate, inform, or entertain.  Another is with what we call “advertising” customers.  These customers use images for brochures, magazines ads, commercial Web sites, and other things that aim to make money.  The third group is our foreign customers.  They use images for both editorial and advertising uses.  Unfortunately, our foreign agents do not always tell use what type of customer used each image.  Plus, we have always thought foreign customers would want different types of images from our domestic customers.

Well, if you are reading this blog, you are probably either an artist who creates images, or someone who markets or is interested in marketing them.  So, time for a little test.  Below are three tables.  Each represents the top ten “categories” of images in sales for last December, from one of our thee markets.  Which one is which?

List A
CATEGORY / SUBCATEGORY
Business / business people  inside office         
Cambodia / general                                 
Couple / indoor                                 
Education / college                                 
Education / teacher  &  student                     
Food / snack  &  dessert                      
Holiday / Christmas                              
Medical Science / miscellaneous                           
Medical Science / research                               
Zoology / deer                                    

List B
CATEGORY / SUBCATEGORY
Agriculture / barley                                 
Cat / cat                                    
Cat / kitten                                 
Concept / business                               
Concept / people                                 
Entertainment / amusement park                         
Entertainment / circus                                 
Food / snack  &  dessert                      
Holiday / Christmas                              
Mature Adult / indoor                                 

List C
CATEGORY / SUBCATEGORY
Agriculture / general                                 
Caribbean Islands / Bermuda                                 
Flower / general                                 
Massachusetts / Cape Cod                               
Pennsylvania / general                                 
South Carolina / General                                 
Sport & Leisure / football                               
Sport & Leisure / sailing                                 
Togo / General                                 
UK: England / General                                 

Of course, one thing that is fascinating, is how diverse each list is.  We run reports on our sales by category each month, and the top categories constantly vary.  Does it help you guess if I give you the same kind of list for August of this year—with a label at the top for which segment each comes from?

Foreign
CATEGORY / SUBCATEGORY
Australia / Sydney                                 
Concept / business                               
Concept / miscellaneous                           
Couple / indoor                                 
Italy / Pisa (incl. Leaning Tower)             
Land Transportation / Auto, racing                           
Miscellaneous / tool                                    
Sport & Leisure / soccer                                 
Woman / portrait indoor                        
Zoology / bear                                    

Editorial
CATEGORY / SUBCATEGORY
Cat / kitten                                 
Concept / business                               
Education / grade school                           
Family / mother  &  child                        
Massachusetts / Boston                                 
Massachusetts / general                                 
Mexico / General                                 
People / general                                 
Washington DC / White House                            
Zoology / deer                                    

Advertising
CATEGORY / SUBCATEGORY
Astronomy / Earth                                  
Australia / Sydney                                 
Aviation / airplane air                           
Caribbean Islands / Bermuda                                 
Industry / fiber optic                            
Mature Adult / outdoor                                 
Meteorology / tornado & hurricane                     
Military / Navy                                    
Togo / general                                 
Woman / portrait indoor                        

There are hints in each list that may be helpful in solving my quiz.  (Of course, you could just skip to the end of the blog and peek at the answers!)  Obscure travel locations like Cambodia, are likely to be requested by our editorial customers.  They are also more likely to dig deeply into our science files, as they search for specific types of animals, plants, minerals, and bacteria!  Advertising clients are often interested in mainstream beach locations, like the Carribean and Cape Cod.  They are more interested in general categories, than specific ones.  They are most likely to want things like indoor portraits and sports.

Foreign clients seem to want it all.  Our file has been successful overseas, because of its breadth.  Our foreign agents use us to fill in all of the holes left from the various specialized collections they gather from elsewhere in the world.

I hope these lists make you realize how little separates each of the stock image markets.  One consequence of the overlap is that we have made our image quality standards more uniform.  For many years, we took images of medium quality if they had some subject we thought was unusual.  The idea was that editorial buyers would accept a lower image quality, if they could get the exact subject they wanted.  About three years ago, we changed this policy.  From that point onward, we began screening out any image that was not top quality in composition, exposure, etc.

We continue to look for unique subjects that may have special interest to our editorial customers.  But, when we find special images on editorial subjects, we now also get images that can be used in advertising and overseas.

Done wrestling with my test?  Here are the answers:

List A = Editorial
List B = Foreign
List C = Advertising

How did you do?  If you got all three right, maybe you should plan to come around for an interview.  We could probably use someone with your talents, on our staff!

Searching for Truth #4--More On Business Abstracts

In a previous installment of "Days of our Lives"...no wait, it was in "Searching for Truth #4," wasn't it?...I rambled around the subject of business abstracts.  I wasn't sure exactly how to show what worked and what didn't work, for the hordes of customers who seem to want these types of images.

I discarded classification as a route to enlightenment, tried some examples, and then fell back on our old friend, semantics.  Yecch.  Let's go the example route again, and try to build new "categories" for the images in this area.

How about looking at business abstracts this way:

1.  Making money.  Commerce, sales effort, prosperity.

2.  Dealing with people.  Management, heirarchy, teamwork.

3.  Major products or services.  Banking, insurance, technology, communications.

4.  Visual expressions of business words.  Investor, success, stress.

I've linked in each case to an image I hope is illustrative.  I can't claim that the images I'm showing you are all best sellers.  First, I don't like to give out that data--it is private to the artists who created the images (who happen to all be MASTERS at creating business abstracts!).  Second, I don't have time to do all the research needed to figure out if each of these images has done well, or not!  Still, I'll put my thirteen years in the industry behind these images as good examples of what should do well.

Want another approach?  We can go back to the classification route and pick five "hot spots."  Here, I'm using aggregate sales data, so again--please don't assume that the images I am pointing to are all making mints of money.  But, I should be showing you where the good soil is, in the field, if you know what I mean.

1.  Miscellaneous objects/jewlery.  Associated with making money and with major products and services like banking and retail."Jewelry"

2.  Miscellaneous objects/scale.  Fairness, justice--dealing with people stuff and some important business words."Scales"

3.  Concepts/medicine.  A lot of major products and services revolve around medicine.  Also, some good business words like "health.""Medicine"

4.  Abstracts/computer generated.  Some of these are beautiful, and that seems to fit into business, somehow.  Others have been built off a product or service, but the computer effects makes it quite abstract."Computer generated"

5.  Miscellaneous objects/tool.  Some of my favorites are here, because they can work on all of the levels I described above."Tools"

Of course, to make this blog appeal to my more juvenile readers, I should include a link to our wonderful Miscellaneous objects/bathroom item!  Yes, it is one of the better-seling groups, thank you!

Want to do more business abstracts?  Good, we want you to create them, too!  Want advice?  OK, here is my attempt at giving it:

1.  Don't include people in the shot, unless they are not recognizable or have caricature-type expressions. If you include people, remember my advice on ethnicity, and try to include a range of ethnic types.

2.  Try to include at least one component that is highly recognizable and relevant to business. A wrench, a dollar bill, a graph, a pair of eyeglasses...don't be so abstract that the image is ONLY beautiful.

3.  Stay away from components that are branded or narrow. If you were doing jewelry, don't shoot pieces from Tiffany or anything else that could be viewed as the trademark work of a professional jeweler.  it you are shooting a tool, use an old one, not something from Home Depot that has a big logo on it.

4.  Leave negative space in the image. The customer will be putting a lot of text into the final composition, to tie the abstract to his or her theme.  Don't squeeze that out.

5.  Give us variations in color, tone, and composition. We may not take them all, but customers often will use several images from a series, if they like them.

6.  Don't be afraid to be painterly or to use illustration-type digital tools. A lot of our best business abstracts have been manipulated.  Of course, the image has to stand up to use at very high resolution.  So, don't lose some much information in your post-processing that a client can't use it full page at 300dpi.

7.  Stay crisp and uncluttered. Business people want to communicate in direct and simple terms.  They don't want fru fru; they don't want to say ten things with one ad.

Hope this is helpful.  We may already have thousands of images in this area.  But, we could probably use ten thousand more!