A few weeks back, we posted the first part of our stock picture buying survey. The response to the release of information on photo buying habits in the stock industry was great to hear. Many people sent us emails or posted on forums saying how much they appreciated a stock agency sharing information and shedding light on an industry that doesn’t have a lot of publicly available information. One email we got was especially helpful and raised questions we felt could be clarified so readers could do more with the results.
"Stock Photo" Living Legend
Jim Pickerell is a stock photo “guru,” whose savvy analysis of industry data and experience in the stock photo business stand up to just about anyone’s around the globe. From the information we shared with Jim, he dug through and analyzed our survey results. Jims’ insights helped our team re-sort the way we arranged the data we had collected and better understand what the data was actually telling us.
Below are portions from an email, we received from Jim, along with additional information, we are releasing today to help others make their assessment of the numbers and data. We didn’t want to add too much opinion below but wanted to share Jim’s thoughts (with his permission of course) and add some more background on the data and panelists. This market information on picture buyers and their habits is even more useful now to those studying the size of the stock photo market and the people who work in it.
Jim Pickerell (Jim):
I presume the respondents to this survey are all from your customer base, and not necessarily a good cross section of microstock customers as a whole (I’m not sure how anyone other than iStock or Shutterstock would ever get such a cross section.)
Cutcaster Response (CC):
We wish they were all current Cutcaster customers but that is not entirely accurate. While we did send the survey to a list of our buyers at Cutcaster, the list encompasses a cross section of buyers who have signed up at Cutcaster, contacts from Adbase (Adbase is a email service provider that has lists of creatives across multiple industries in North America who use creative imagery), image users on 3rd party sites, picture buying forums and individually emailing buyers we know to ask them to participate. Their professional backgrounds covered most industries. Almost all responses came from image buyers in North American with the next largest group being South America and the UK.
Jim:
It is interesting to me that such a high percentage of the respondents (25.3%) are involved in book, magazine or newspaper publishing. I would think that for the microstock industry as a whole that percentage might be somewhat less, although these people may use a large quantity of images.
CC:
We made the same assumption but your observation might be changed by our response to the answers we gave above regarding our survey pool. In addition, the percentage could change as we add people who answered the question with “Other” into industry categories that their job would place them in even if they didn’t click off that industry. Some photo researchers who would work with multiple industries might have thrown this off slightly. We didn’t poll the respondents regarding their use of royalty free vs rights managed but we assume they are using a mixture of both of just RF. Also we think some of the higher end buyers who didn’t know about microstock and the more affordable microstock imagery are starting to find these new agencies and pricing models and moving their licensing dollars to those companies.
Here is a cross section of some of the resources that users who answered that they were invovled in the used these agencies when sourcing information. You can see how much Getty and Corbis dominate and that’s to be expected. The question asked, “What are your top three resources for finding stock photos?” and each row shows one responders’ answers.
| Getty Images | iStockphoto | Alamy Images | ||
| Getty Images | Shutterstock | Alamy Images | ||
| Getty Images | Corbis | Veer | Alamy | |
| Corbis | iStockphoto | Cutcaster | ||
| Getty Images | Corbis | Alamy Images | ||
| Getty Images | Masterfile | |||
| Getty Images | Corbis | Alamy Images | ||
| Corbis | Alamy Images | SPECIALTY PHOTOGRAPHERS | ||
| Alamy Images | Corbis | Shutterstock | ||
| Getty Images | Corbis | Cutcaster | we use many | |
| Getty Images | Corbis | Google Image | ||
| Getty Images | Corbis | Google Image | iStockphoto | Alamy |
| Getty Images | Corbis | iStockphoto | Alamy | |
| Alamy Images | Shutterstock | Granger | ||
Jim:
It would be interesting to come up with a total number of times a year these people purchase images compared with the number of times for “graphic design firms” and “Freelancer Ad/Graphic”.
CC:
We like your thinking here and will re-sort the data into that view you asked about. Scouring over the responses, it appears the publishing industry is buying a larger amount of images at varying prices but more infrequently versus the “graphic design firms” and “Freelancer Ad/Graphic” companies who download a lot images in smaller numbers and at lower prices throughout the year.
Jim:
One of the big questions is how much small graphic design firms and freelance graphic artists are driving the business. My guess is that the combined total of the 26.6% of respondents are mostly 1 to 4 person shops and that they purchase imagery a very high number of times per year. (It would be great if you have some type of breakdown of how many images these people used annually.)
CC:
From what we can see it appears you are correct. We can re-filter the data to see what we can come up with regarding smaller businesses driving the market changes.
Jim:
Getting back to the publishers if there is any way to determine how much imagery they are using it would be great. Are they all using more than 50 images per year, or are they only going to microstock sites 2 or 3 times a year. If there is good reason to believe that this group of customers is representative of the industry as a whole, and that they are using a lot of images it says a lot about what the future holds for the traditional licensingmodel.
CC:
Here is a sampling of the first 15 results based on pulling some of the information out of our excel sheets. It first shows how many times a year they are buying an image and then how much on average do they spend per image. This appears to be representative of the entire panelist group who responded that they worked in publishing.
1. More than 50 times per year > $101 to $250
2. More than 50 times per year > $101 to $250
3. More than 50 times per year > $101 to $250
4. More than 50 times per year > Over $250
5. 3-10 times per year > $101 to $250
6. More than 50 times per year > $101 to $250
7. More than 10 times per year > $51 to $10
8. More than 10 times per year > $101 to $250
9. More than 50 times per year > $101 to $250
10. More than 50 times per year > $51 to $100
11. More than 50 times per year > $101 to $250
12. More than 50 times per year > Over $250
13. More than 50 times per year > $101 to $250
14. More than 50 times per year >$101 to $250
15. More than 10 times per year >$101 to $250
Jim:
Another thing that is very interesting is who the 21.3% of “other” buyers are. I would have thought you would have covered virtually everyone in all your other categories of use. More of an explanation of who is in this category would be helpful.
CC:
Here is a list of just a few of the job titles that survey respondents used to describe their work. When we dug back over the results from other we realized that some of the respondents could have been grouped in some of the other industry categories and some photo researchers could be lumped into other groups. Below is a short list of some of their responses for other to give you an idea:
1. Occasional buyer small projects
2. Writer/blogger
3. Building my own, small niche web sites
4. Gift Giver
5. Broker buying and sellings businesses
6. Freelance Photo Researcher for book publishers
7. Home entertainment – make DVDs
8. Marketing firm
9. Law Firm
10. TV/broadcast
11. Corporate in-house design unit
12. Record Label
13. Interior design and graphic design
14. Self-employed
15. Wholesale Beverage Distributor
Jim:
I am surprised that the “government, etc.” category only had 4% of the respondents. I would have thought this group would have been much larger.
CC:
Same.
Jim:
53.3% of respondents say they typically spend more than $51 per image. This may be true of your customer base, but it is certainly not true of all microstock customers. Maybe you are only attracting the high end customers. If that is true then it is certainly something that needs to be taken into account when considering the overall survey results.
CC:
We don’t only cater to microstock customers because photographers and designers can set their prices at Cutcaster so that is why we believe you will see a broader cross section of industries and spend rates across the board.
Thank you to Jim for providing his insight and letting us respond on our blog. We hope this helps those who want to learn more about he stock photography marketplace in general.
In a continuing effort to release as much information as we can concerning picture buyers and their habits in today’s stock industry, we will look at what things image buyers disliked that their image agency did or wasn’t doing. This question was one part of a two part question relating to what picture buyers liked and didn’t like about the stock agencies they work with. Below is a collection of their responses in no order of importance but cover the range of dislikes that image buyers had.
1. Prefer stock sites that have a current selection images of people using media (my firm sells advertising in magazines, online and mobile devices.) The laptops, computer screens, and mobile devices should be current. People using the devices need to look realistic. They should look somewhat affluent or have some purchasing power.
2. Few images of “ordinary” people of many backgrounds, skin colors or multi-national origins. Few images of disabled individuals or groups doing ordinary (non-medical) activities, bland generic office pictures.
3. Keywords need to be accurately curated, correct caption information, no time to sift through keywording spam. Keyword spam makes me not want to visit a site.
4. Same images on every site and smaller agencies that are different get subsumed by the larger ones
5. Dropping or losing photographer/images and then being unable to re-license them for p/up imagery
6. Caps to RF imagery or microstock imagery
7. Everyone uses the same great images. Should be a system for professional level and entry level buyers so everyone isn’t using the same images/vector files…
8. It’s difficult to find great deals or new imagery since they are all concentrated under Getty and Corbis again…There is very little good, new material.
9. Discontinuing of RF CDs
10. Photos that SCREAM “I’m a stock photo.” More quality stock illustration at lower costs – less computer generated in feel.
11. It’s not very fun and takes a ling time to search for images.
12. Credits packages that do not expire.
13. Sites that don’t allow for repeat download of photos purchased.
14. Overly complex search engines
15. The search engines for iStock and Corbis aren’t very intuitive, or aren’t as intuitive as they could be. Getty has better search filters. The quality of the photos are sometimes hit and miss. I understand that to be acceptable for lower priced images like iStock but some of the other larger ones still have that same issue.
16. I think just having better search and/or search and filtering methods, would save us tremendous amounts of time and get better results. Perhaps better tagging, or more accurate tagging of the images. Many times I will get provocative images when I’m not searching for them.
What do you dislike about the stock agency you choose to work with? Is there anything you hate which they do? What would you change?
When we decided to re-design and re-write the code for the new Cutcaster site last year, we knew we needed first to get a better idea of who was using Cutcaster, what was their process for using royalty free image libraries and how we could better serve them once we released the new site. Listening to what they told us led how we built Cutcaster and was a valuable undertaking not only for us but we felt that it would be really helpful for our Cutcaster members and the industry in general. Over the past year, we surveyed some of the largest and smallest image buyers using Cutcaster or in the stock photo and clipart industry to learn more about their image buying habits, demographics and photo needs in general. In an effort to provide our users and readers with details that can help educate and improve their sales, we are releasing what we have learned from the buyer surveys to the community at large.
Over the next two weeks, Cutcaster will be releasing a large amount of data from our picture buyer survey to help those interested in the stock photography market or using Cutcaster. If you use this information please link back to Cutcaster (http://cutcaster.com or this blog post). The survey was completed by 344 image users mostly in the US and Canada who use royalty free or rights managed images. The following results were collected from their responses. Note: Click on the thumbnail images to see the survey results in a larger window.
What category best describes the type of company or organization for which you work
The above shows what type of individuals, companies or industries are buying images at Cutcaster.
When purchasing digital images and illustrations, which of the following activities do you perform?
The above chart shows what role the image buyer plays in their organization’s decision making process for searching, obtaining pricing, purchasing and approval process for using Cutcaster. It will give you an idea for what type of decision makers are coming to Cutcaster to find images and download them on behalf of themselves or their firm.
How many people work at your company?
The above chart shows the average size of the firm that a buyer works for.
How frequently do you purchase stock photography in a typical year?
How frequently are image researchers or buyers downloading royalty free images or clipart per year. We can see that a very large percentage of responders said they license more than 50 images a year.
Image buyers annual budget
Check out how much a typical picture buyer spends on a single image or clipart download from a stock agency. The above chart shows image buyers spend per single image. Remember that this includes both royalty free and rights managed licensing (as well as free).
Next week, Cutcaster will release more information regarding what decisions go into choosing an agency / image library, what picture buyers like most and least about their stock agencies they work with currently and what things image buyers want to see an agency do but aren’t at the moment.
Here’s a great list of the top searched terms on the site. We would love to see more of this kind of work and feature some of our hottest image makers! You can click on any of these image links for edited lightboxes related to these subjects. You can search all lightboxes, built by Cutcaster and our users by clicking the Lightbox icon at the far top right of site. This will take you to our lightbox search page. Just input a keyword search term to see all the lightboxes related to your search!
Abstract – abstracts are great for presentations, backgrounds and wallpaper.
Baby - We love babies at Cutcaster and so do our buyers.
Banking – We keep our eyes on the news!
Baseball – If it’s spring it’s baseball season!
Beach – It’s about time to play on the beach.
Business People – One of the top searches. Our business people are tops.
Calendar – Our vector calendars are tops.
Car – Automotive topics are in the news and in demand.
Cell Phone – Check out these fantastic images of people on the phone.
Child- We love kids too!!!
Computer - Computer and laptop images in high demand.
Concept- This is a light box of Law Concepts. Search Concept for all of our light boxes with special themes.
Cooking – Healthy cooking and eating images in high demand.
Dog - Pooch portraits are on the rise.
Drink - It’s happy hour! Search light boxes for Beverages for all our drink light boxes.
Flowers - Still one of the most searched words. Check out our premium box.
Food - We have some of the finest food photographers in the business at Cutcaster. Search on food for light boxes of food collections.
Fruit - Beautiful, seasonal, fresh.
Furniture - Isolated or in place, furniture shots have a lot of uses.
Garden - Gardens, gardening, and outdoor living are hot topics.
Golf - Fore!! We are looking for the greenest greens.
Health Spa – Spa topics are sought after at Cutcaster.
Illustration – Illustrations like web icons, silhouettes, concepts are in demand.
Medical - Medicine and health care images are in high demand. We would love to see hospital and doctor’s offices.
Money- Currency, financial, trading, and thrift concepts.
Office Team- Office people in groups, interacting with each other.
People family- Families acting naturally together in demand!
Real estate – Front page news, real estate concepts are needed now.
Sky- Something as simple as the sky, or as complex as weather are searched for now.
Soccer – We are looking for sports of all kinds.
Spiritual – Religion topics, we need many more of these themes.
Wine – Connoisseurs love our wine images.
Keep those images coming, and check our lightboxes often for new ideas!!
Cutcaster had an amazing second year!!! Here is a quick recap:
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Thank you for your support of www.cutcaster.com!
Somebody pinch us. Is summer over and are we really into Fall? It’s amazing how fast the days fly by and what has been accomplished in that short period of time at Cutcaster with your help. We quickly passed 300k uploads to Cutcaster in August but are in need of specific content that our buyers have requested. To see an updated list of images and illustrations that we still need and will be showcased to buyers, view the Photos and Vectors we need page here. We are attending the PictureHouse tradeshow in New York on October 14th and need your shots to show to the hundreds of buyers who will attend this event! We are at table G4, right next to Getty, so stop by to say hello and enter to win an Amazon Kindle.
Here are a few releases you may not have noticed.
1. Our first premium photography and vector collection was released called Crescendo. I am sure a couple of you noticed the creative firestorm it caused
2. Scaled pricing for different resolutions was introduced.
3. Expanded the scope of our rights offering with new Extended Licenses.
4. We increased the speed of the site and speed of search. Test it out from your last visit.
We hired a new Creative Director to help with the growing collection. Along with the review team, she will be aggressively editing the collection, building “feature lightboxes,” and communicating with and recruiting new photographers. She is also helping to improve our upload method and review process in general. You can reach her at creativedirector@cutcaster.com.
Don’t forget our Affiliate Program!
If you have a personal website, you can use our links and logos here to earn 10% from buyers and 5% from sellers who you refer!
Fresh, New, and Exclusive!
From June to September, we demo’ed the site for and talked with hundreds of new buyers to introduce them to the new Corporate Buyer Accounts. We have forged personal relationships with our buyers and are responding to their suggestions on content and site mechanics. WE KNOW ATTRACTING BUYERS IS PRIORITY NUMBER ONE FOR EVERYONE AND WE ARE WORKING HARD TO PROMOTE THE SITE EVERYWHERE.
We know many of you mass market your photos. Our buyers are also looking for exclusive content and want to find more of it at Cutcaster. Don’t forget you earn 50% on exclusive content and you can set the price.
Thanks again for submitting to Cutcaster, it is your great work that makes us grow! Keep an eye out for more improvements to site speed and search in the coming weeks!
Warm Regards,
The Cutcaster team
With summertime in full swing and the Fourth of July fireworks now just a distant memory or your most recent photo-shoot, we wanted to share our Cutcaster plans that are in full swing for expanding the amount of unique content buyers are asking and searching for at Cutcaster as well as improving the customer experience so more buyers learn about how simple and time saving Cutcaster is to use.
A few updates:
More and more creatives are discovering how easy to use and organized our Cutcaster Buyer Accounts can make their work lives. They offer the most flexible ways to pay and save buyers both money and time. The buyers accounts have been refined based on feedback we have gotten with regards to streamlining/customizing the invoicing process, creating sub-accounts and downloading comp’ed images.
The ability to buy different photo sizes at different prices is just around the corner. We have been beta testing the functionality so we can offer up to 5 different image sizes for buyers and things are on track for a release by the end of this month.
We began testing out three new Google Adwords campaigns that will be put into full swing by end of August once we get all our tracking and most appropriate keywords in place. In addition, we have continued to optimize the site and your studio pages with search engines so they come up higher in organic search results. A great way you can help us is by linking to the site and your studio from your website with a referral link or through a link exchange. You can also use the “share” button to get more views and sales. If you have a site you want to add to our list of resources, please let us know.
We have started to sell our first few Extended Licenses and are excited to offer the additional rights to our buyers to meet their needs and see the extra money that brings into the contributors. It is a real win-win. If you want to learn more about the additional rights you can purchase, check out the Extended License section of the site.
Connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.
Please double check your keywords so we have clean search results. Here is more info on keywording to help you. You can also flag files that show up in keyword search results where they shouldn’t belong by clicking on the red “x” underneath the thumbnails in the search window. This really helps us.
Thanks again and please be in touch with any feedback or questions you may have. We look forward to a productive summer and busy Fall with all of you.
Our new email system is in place and working to spread the word but as always we need your help. If you haven’t been using your referral codes and banners to get extra cash, take a look at how the referral program works and start to invite your co-workers and friends to join us. In addition, you can help spread the word by talking about us on forums, email list-serves, using the “share this” button on your studio page or media details page and adding your studio to the major search engines.
On that note….
We are aggressively expanding our buyers list through a number of channels. I make about 20-30 phone calls a day to introduce Cutcaster and learn about how companies are licensing your content. Like I said before it’s a grueling and long process but I see it paying dividends and sales are improving month over month. I realize that not everyone is making sales at this moment so please stay patient as we grow The addition of corporate accounts and Cutcaster credits will offer buyers another two ways to purchase content from us that work seamlessly in their licensing workflow. I am really excited about the Corporate accounts for large image buyers. In addition, we have been dropping press releases, sending out email blasts to publishers, advertisers and graphic designers, joined two affiliate networks, created coupons and discount codes for buyers to use, optimized our site and blog even more, started buying keywords on major search engines, started advertising in publications that are best for reaching our demographic, going to trade shows for image buyers and doing in office meetings/demos with potential customers.
As always things are happening behind the scenes that would bore you but I hope this sheds light onto what we have been doing to keep ourselves busy and moving successfully forward. If you ever want to talk to me personally my email is john AT cutcaster DOT com or my cell is 215-688-2751. I am free to help at any time
Hang out with us!