Search
What kind of pictures do companies really want for their ads? What are they actually buying? In this story we'll look at some ways to get more of what customers want to buy into the images collections. And, maybe less of the images that just sit there and no one ever want to use them.
Adobe Stock offers customers a very useful search feature that Shutterstock, Getty Images and iStock have chosen to ignore. Adobe lets customers search for
“Undiscovered” images. We assume that means image that have never been used, although Adobe doesn’t make that entirely clear.
As image databases become larger and larger it becomes more and more difficult for customers to quickly find the “right image” for their projects. Increasingly, customers are frustrated by this problem. They want more choice, but they don’t want it to take them longer to find an image they can use.
In a story by Rick Boost published in Campaign Asia-Pacific, a publication providing insights and intelligence into the ideas, work and personalities shaping Asia’s marketing-communications industry, Kumi Shimamoto, Asia vice-president for Getty Images, says that one of the reasons for the company’s position as the largest image supplier in the world is its audience research methods.
One of the major problems faced by the stock photo industry is “too many images.” Customers don’t need more images they need to be able to
find an image that works quickly. To offer some additional search options Adobe has introduced some AI-powered
aesthetic filters that will enable art directors to search more naturally and intuitively.
Assuming you are taking pictures because you want to earn some money from what you produce, it would be very helpful to have some information about which images among the hundreds of millions out there are actually selling, and how frequently.
What’s in demand?
Stock Performer recently published an article entitled “
Are you uploading enough files to make money from microstock?” The article offers some interesting statistics. However, there are some other issues that need to be considered like, “Is More Automatically Better.”
I just received a press release from
Envato Elements that offers “inspiring and ready-to-use photos, templates, fonts and assets” for $29 a month. They say Envato Elements “now includes 200,000 hand picked photos” from its
PhotoDune collection of 9 million photos. (Actually, there are currently 244,085 photos in the Elements collection.)
The European Commission, which polices European Union competition rules, has imposed a €2.42 billion euros (
$2.72 Billion) fine on Google for breaching antitrust rules with its online shopping service. The ruling alleges that "Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service." Google was given 90 days to stop or face fines of up to 5 percent of the average daily worldwide turnover of parent company Alphabet.
In a comment to my
previous story, Sarah Fix of Blend Images pointed out that technology solutions alone may not provide photographers with the information they need to make the most productive use of their time and resources.
A fundamental flaw with stock photography as a business is that producers have little or no access to the data necessary to understand demand. In most any other business the producer has some idea of what is selling and how much demand there is for the particular product.
In one of its recent promotions directed to customers,
Getty Images has identified three trending search terms, Mismatch, Heroines and Internet of Things. See what images you find using these terms.
According to a survey conducted by the European CEPIC industry association, 85% of the images found by visual search systems are illegal copies. 80% of these illegal images were distributed through search engines like the Google image search.
Shutterstock may have decided the loading up of their collection with “Similar Content” may have gotten out of hand and may not be benefiting customers. They have recently changed their editing strategy and issued a
notice to contributors saying, “Submitting subtle variations of the same image can be considered content spamming and is not permitted. We continuously evaluate our collection and remove images that do not meet our policies.”
There is a lot of noise about the demand for photos that are “natural,” “candid” and more “realistic shots of real people” rather than the carefully arranged, high production value photos that have been best sellers in the stock photo industry for many years.
I was recently asked if I had any statistics on the number of unique RM/RF images available for commercial licensing. Last September Justin Brinson said he had more than 500,000,000 unique RM and traditional RF images (no microstock) on his
PicturEngine platform. These images were provided by 64 different agencies and a number of individual photographers.
One things that surprised me about the research I did for the
Alamy Measures article was the small number of sales that were recorded.
I Made A Mistake. In last week’s story on
Alamy Image Manager I said that “contributors have no idea how frequently customers use a particular word to search for images.” That turns out to be totally wrong.
As image databases get larger and larger, keywording becomes more and more important as photographers try to get their work high enough in the search-return-order for the images to be seen. Often creators must spend more time keywording than they spend taking pictures. In addition, image distributors are constantly coming up with new strategies that often necessitate going back and re-keywording images that have already been uploaded.
Dreamstime editors and CEO Serban Enache recently released a promotion of
250 “authentic” images from the Dreamstime collection. While this collection of images certainly shows customers that Dreamstime has some very impressive and beautiful images, it may not be very representative of what Dreamstime is actually selling. Thus, when planning future shoots image creators may not want to use this collection as a guide.
A couple weeks ago, I was interviewed by an NPR writer for a story about stock photography. The first question out of the box was “Why aren’t the stock agencies doing a better job of showing diversity?” I wasn’t sure how to answer that question because I felt that for a long time photographers have been pushed to show more diversity and there must be a lot of such pictures in the stock agency collections.
The major agencies talk about how important their DATA is and how it has changed the industry. They argue that the company with the most and best data will be the winner. But I don’t think they are really looking at much of the data they have collected – or looking at it in the right way.
iStock photographers may want to use downtime over the Christmas and New Year holidays to prepare and upload images that are in the photographer’s queue for their eventual upload to iStock. The Unification of the upload system for both the Getty Images and iStock sites is now scheduled to go into effect on February 1, 2017. There are plans to change the keyword vocabulary for both sites over to the Getty vocabulary, which might mean that after that time the keywords the photographer submits may no longer be included in the list of words attached to the image.
How many customers make maximum use of their subscriptions? Most businesses that offer subscriptions offer their customers much more than they can ever use for one fixed price. Some customers like this because they know exactly what their monthly costs will be regardless of how much they use the service.
I was recently asked by an African American stock photo customer why the stock photo industry doesn’t do a better job of showing diversity. I was surprised by the question and didn’t know how to answer.