What U.S. state is most popular? One way to measure this is to look at our licensing information by category. As you can guess, we have a separate category for each state, with subcategories for major cities and sites within each. It is pretty easy to add up the sales made over the last three years, and announce which states were the overall revenue leaders for that period:
(Please don’t argue that Washington, D.C. doesn’t count as a state! FYI, at just over 570,000 residents, the District of Columbia has a bigger population than Wyoming and about the same as North Dakota, Alaska, and Vermont.)
There are probably no surprises on this list, nor would it be surprising that these five states lag at the bottom of the list: Oklahoma, Mississippi, Delaware, Kansas, and North Dakota. (Poor North Dakota! Over the past three years, images of it generated only 0.2% of what those of New York brought in.) If we take the analysis one step further, we can express return in terms of annual revenue per image in the file for each state. This allowed me to adjust for the fact that major states like New York and California have many more images (5,800 and 6,205 respectively) than less photogenic states like Iowa and West Virginia (33 and 30 respectively). This adjustment changes the order dramatically, and gives us a whole new order:
Iowa—nice to see a “Midwestern” state get credit for something other than corn and cattle!
West Virginia—one of the few states we have no subcategories for. Guess no one in our library could think of a special site in this state, that needed its own file.
Arkansas—a cool state, that is more than just the home state of the Clintons.
Maryland—Baltimore has had a big renaissance, and this state’s beaches and meadows are beautiful.
Michigan—nice to see a “Midwestern” state…oh, I said that already. (Remember, I’m from Ohio and LOVE the Midwest!)
Can data like this lead to a geographical strategy for U.S. travel shooting? Are there cities or sites that are underrepresented in our file or extra popular? Given the broad sweep of images and subjects in this area, we probably have to go down one more level to get an answer. Here are five category/subcategory combinations that look promising to me:
- Detroit, Michigan. This city has changed dramatically in the past ten years. We don’t have many images of Detroit, and a lot of them are not up to date.
- The White House. We have just over 60 images of this American icon. I’m not sure what new angle we could get on this image—but there is a good opportunity here, if you’d got an idea.
- New York Snow Scenes. We don’t get that much snow in New York. But, when the white stuff covers our grime and grit, it is beautiful. You can’t force it to happen, but when the forecast is snow, grab that camera and get outdoors!
- Newport, Rhode Island. If you haven’t seen the mansions, the harbor, the shops and the streets of this ancient (for the US) city, take a camera and go! Stay at one of the bed and breakfast places and don’t forget to use vinegar on your fries—real Rhode Islanders don’t use ketchup.
- The Corn Palace, South Dakota. OK, this one may not be fair, because we only have two images of the Corn Palace and it is hard to know how much more room there is, for such a specialized subject. However, I want to make the point that there are hundreds of interesting, unique, local subjects, that deserve to be recorded. Each time a new museum opens, a state capitol is renovated, or a new statue is erected, why not get us a shot for our library?
Please don’t expect instant miracles, if you give us more images on these subjects. But, it probably makes sense to focus on areas like these (we have less than 100 images on most of them), rather than working in fields that have already been ploughed, planted, and harvested, too many times.
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