I have been looking at some of the Visual Trends 2018 reports. I hope they are helping customers because I don’t think they are doing much for image creators.
Take
Getty’s trend report which evidently came out of the UK office. They say, “our Creative team analyzed 1 billion searches and 400 million imagery downloads on GettyImages.com, studied advertising trends, and examined pop culture shifts to predict three defining visual trends of 2018.”
If, in fact there were 400 million downloads in 2017 (maybe this was over a longer period than a year) and Getty generated around $280 million in revenue from its Creative collection then the average gross sale per download was $0.70. A 35% royalty would mean that on average photographers received $0.25 per download.
After reviewing their sales reports many photographers might be willing to believe these numbers despite the fact that they see in very rare instances licenses for much higher fees. Certainly, the RF list prices of Extra small, $50; Small, $175; Medium, $375 and Large, $575 are seldom what is paid for a download.
If you search Getty’s Creative collection you find that currently there are 22,447,306 images in the collection, 15,890,728 of them are RF. Thus, on average, each image in the collection would be downloaded about 18 times in a year and on average contributors would something in the range of $4.50 per-image in the collection per-year.
Since we know that a huge percentage of the images are never licensed then many that are are licensed will be licensed many more times per-year than 18.
Trends Identified
The three trends that Getty has identified are Second Renaissance, Conceptual Realism and Masculinity Undone. They have provided boards with images in each of these categories and links to similar images. Here are a few links to check out.
1 –
Second Renaissance
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/sets/TmrTYvr0UEy091sYpbN2AQ#license
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/more-like-this/748351671?sort=best#license
2 –
Conceptual Realism
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/sets/D2yihabnjUy9_LBxq_sO9g#license
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/more-like-this/478431911?page=4&sort=best#license
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/more-like-this/143043461?sort=best#license
3 –
Masculinity Undone
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/sets/jxVQ18Xr2k2kXrLRGnR6Vg#license
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/more-like-this/685827046?sort=best#license
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/more-like-this/579009377?sort=best#license
I may not know much about what customers want, but I can’t imagine that anyone is purchasing the vast majority of the images being shown. That is, unless they are purchasing them to do one of those stories on crazy, stupid, ridiculous, useless stock images that are published online almost every day.
These collections do include some good, useful stock images that would help people sell and promote products and service, but they are certainly in the minority.
What image creators need, if trend reports are to be useful in helping them produce more of what customers want, are examples of exactly what is selling and some idea of the images that have been most popular relative to those that have sold a couple times to those whose purpose is to disparage the use of stock photography.
Getty has shown a lot of images, but since we’re pretty sure that most of them have not sold, the information gained is useless. If anything, it encourages some photographers to produce more of what no one wants.
Just showing a handful of “best sellers” doesn’t work either because there is not enough information to understand the variable of what might be acceptable and what isn’t.
AdobeStock
To be fair to Getty we should also take a look at AdobeStock’s new trend report entitled “
The Fluid Self: Visualizing New Identities.”
Adobe seems to be doing more frequent trend reports focused on narrower topics. Earlier this year they did one on “
Silence and Solitude: Escaping Information Overload.” In their trend reports they give only a hand full of examples that are not enough to get an idea of what customers are actually buying.
For links to other trend reports see
this story.
Help Image Creators
I’ve said this before, but if these agencies want more of what their customers want to buy, they had better start giving suppliers (image creators) more specific information about exactly what the customers are buying. If they just say, “We need More, More, More” and leave it up to the creators they will continue to get a lot of what no one wants and everyone will waste their time. The data is available. Share it.