If you’re goal is to earn a significant portion of your livelihood from the images you produce, and you already have a significant number of the best image you know how to produce with all the agencies and distributors who represent your work, does it make sense to regularly add even more images of the same general subjects to these collections?
Most stock agencies and distributors will tell you that the media partners that submit an average of 200-500 new images per month see the best results. Even when sales overall are down for the agency “they’re not hit so hard in the decline,” one distributor said.
A Few Things To Recognize
1 - Agencies have virtually no production costs when adding new images. (Yes, there are upload and storage costs, but these are minor compared to the image creators out of pocket costs and time involved in producing new images.)
2 – To entice customers to keep coming back agencies believe they must tell them that they are constantly adding new, better and more updated images to their collections. (They do this despite the fact that new is not always better, and there are a huge number of subjects like wildlife and still lifes where newness has very little relevance to the user.)
3 – Most agencies that license RM and traditional RF (I’ll call these uses Premium) organize search returns delivered by including a certain percentage of new images mixed with images that have been in greatest demand recently. Microstock agencies do the same in their Best Match or Most Relevant searches, but they also give customers the option of organizing searches by “Most Popular.” In this case the images are ordered based on most downloads over a period of time. New images that have never been downloaded fall at the bottom of the search return order.
4 – Art buyers are busy. They don’t have lots of time to look at every image returned with a given search. Getty has reported that very few buyers will look at more than three pages of thumbnails (roughly 600 images) before changing the search parameters or going somewhere else to find what they need.
If you’re a Premium shooter consider this. In 2006 Getty had 1,767,214 Premium images in its collection and licensed almost 1.7 million uses. In 2014 they had over 10 million Premium images in the collection. There is every indication that they licensed quite a bit fewer than 1.7 million uses in 2014. Their average price per image licensed in 2014 was probably less than half of what they charged in 2006. In 2006 total Premium revenue was $634 million. By 2014 Premium revenue had dropped to $280 million for the year. Getty’s Premium revenue has been steadily declining for the last 8 quarters.
Most other Premium sellers have seen declines, although in many cases not quite as bad as Getty. (For more info see
here.) Many customers that used to buy Premium imagery are finding what they need for most projects on Microstock and Subscription sites.
Odds Of New Images Being Seen
Most agencies and distributors are growing their collections dramatically. I decided to check Shutterstock for a popular subject to see how many returns I received. Two years ago Shutterstock had 25 million images in its collection. Today, they have over 52 million. It is not hard to imagine the collection doubling again in another two years.
Using three keywords I searched for “woman, computer, office.” In the Relevant mode I got 130,956 returns. In the Popular mode I got 131,133 returns that had all three words. Remember buyers may make their choice from the first 600 delivered.
Then I chose image 158856656 from Wavebreakmedia. Wavebreakmedia has almost 289,000 total images on Shutterstock. Probably most of these same images are on many other microstock sites.
There were 39 keywords attached to image 158856656. When I searched for each word individually, I got the following number of returns per word.
| woman |
7,545,479 |
| business |
6,114,904 |
| swivel chair |
4,312 |
| tablet computer |
657,329 |
| attractive |
4,185,483 |
| corporate |
1,208,147 |
| sitting |
1,387,397 |
| well dressed |
113,199 |
| tablet |
429,469 |
| caucasian |
4,583,290 |
| female |
6,525,552 |
| touching |
470,961 |
| tehnology |
3,215,658 |
| computer |
2,059,739 |
| elegant |
4,072,540 |
| scrolling |
441,673 |
| brown hair |
479,869 |
| 20s |
631,578 |
| pc |
442,081 |
| young adult |
3,679,559 |
| tablet pc |
657,327 |
| touchscreen |
133,227 |
| smart |
589,605 |
| classy |
99,189 |
| businesswoman |
705,505 |
| professional |
1,531,601 |
| electronic |
714,383 |
| stylish |
1,416,425 |
| workplace |
219,768 |
| beautiful |
132,825 |
| using |
253,837 |
| computer monitor |
372,801 |
| indoors |
1,558,571 |
| office |
2,019,962 |
| brunette |
1,149,405 |
| pretty |
3,371,745 |
| screen |
631,652 |
| long hair |
667,630 |
| digital tablet |
235,398 |
If customers are only going to look at the first 600 images shown consider how many are unlikely to be seen.
Interestingly the word with the fewest number of returns was “swivel chair,” but if you look at the picture it is hard to tell that’s what the woman is sitting on. Also, how often will an art director care about that aspect of an image or think to use that word.
It is possible for an art director to dramatically narrow the search by getting more and more specific with each search request. But the more words they have to enter to get a manageable number of returns the greater the odds that one of those words the AD uses won’t be on your list of keywords for that general subject. Here are a few examples:
| woman tablet computer |
60,741 |
| woman tablet computer indoors |
13,838 |
| woman tablet computer office |
15,477 |
| woman tablet computer scrolling |
3,342 |
| woman tablet computer office brunette |
859 |
| woman tablet computer office classy |
369 |
| woman tablet computer office 20s |
1,521 |
| woman tablet computer office 20s sitting |
686 |
| woman tablet computer office 20s swivel chair |
131 |
| woman tablet computer office 20s scrolling |
150 |
And the art director knows that the more they narrow their searches to see just a few images, the more likely they are to miss seeing good images that didn’t happen to have one or more of the keyword they used.
Conclusions
If you don’t continue to add images on a regular basis there is a high likelihood that most, if not all, of your images will be buried so deep in a very short period of time that they will be seldom, if ever, seen.
If you happen to have an easily identifiable niche that few others shoot and your images are well keyworded with words that only buyers of your niche use then your images may have a much longer useful life. However, there are very few such niches. To determine if you niche is one of them search the major agency websites for your niche.
If you determine that you must constantly add new images in order to generate a reasonable number of sales, then the key question is can you produce those new images at a low enough cost (remember to include your time) to cover your expenses and turn a profit. More and more top revenue producers from the past are discovering they can’t.