In June 2014,
Visual Steam surveyed thousands of U.S. art buyers, art directors, art producers, creative directors and marketing professionals to better understand stock image buying behavior today (still photography and motion). The company has published the results of its
2014 Buyers Survey. 100% of the respondents are buyers of stock photography.
Of the respondents 89% use stock in 50% to 100% of their projects and 99% use stock in at least 25% of their projects. Two-thirds (67%) of the respondents license rights to at least 50 images a year.
When asked which is more important
Quality of Price, 77% of respondents said they would sacrifice Quality for Price. For 3% Price was always the deciding factor and the other 74% said they sacrifice it sometimes.
The buyers were asked to rank the factors of
greatest importance to them in their decision making process. The results were:
1 - Quality
2 - Rights in-perpetuity
3 - Ease of Access
4 - Price
5 - Exclusivity
Rights in-perpetuity jumped from 4th place in 2013 to 2nd this year.
The following is a list of the
subjects most in demand and the percentage of buyers that responded to each usage type.
| People |
28% |
| Concepts - Background |
18% |
| Business and Industry |
16% |
| Medical - Health |
9% |
| Food and Beverage |
6% |
| Travel, Nature, Destinations |
6% |
| Science and Technology |
5% |
| Sports (leisure action) |
5% |
| Beauty and Fashion |
4% |
| Historical/Archival |
2% |
| Fine Art |
1% |
When asked to list their
Favorite Agencies, or the agencies they think of first they listed the following:
| Getty |
77% |
| iStock |
57% |
| Shutterstock |
53% |
| Corbis |
40% |
| Veer |
32% |
| Thinkstock |
28% |
| Masterfile |
2% |
| Google |
1.5% |
| Media Bakery, Pacasearch, Stocksy |
1% |
Also mentioned, but not in significant numbers, were: AGE, Imagesource, BigStock, Alamy, Superstock, Offset, Pond5, Junkinvideoand stockxchange.
However, when asked to list their
First Stop when looking for images Thinkstock jumped from 6th to 3rd place.
| Getty |
40% |
| iStock |
23% |
| Thinkstock |
17% |
| Shutterstock |
8% |
| Google |
5% |
| AGE and Veer |
2.5% |
| Pacasearch |
2% |
The difference between Thinkstock and Shutterstock is a little strange. If we assume all of Thinkstock's sales were in the U.S. we know that Shutterstock’s U.S. sales alone are 2 to 3 times those of Thinkstock. Thus, we have to assume that there is a big community of buyers who either were not reached by this survey or failed to respond. Nevertheless, the full
survey results are well worth examining.
Leslie Hughes, Visual Steam’s Founder and CEO, said, “Art buyers tell us that stock agencies can do better. Searching for stock imagery is difficult and takes too much time. Even so, nearly all use stock imagery in the majority of their projects. Additionally, 60% say their use of stock images will increase in the coming year.”