I’m finally getting a decent dataset together to answer the burning question: What are stock photo buyers searching for? Here are THE top 1000 searches made by stock photography buyers over the last 6 months to 2 years.
This data, and whatever else I can gleam from the various datasets I have (around half a million or so searches) will be worked into the picWorkflow stats/analysis tools (they’re nearly ready to go). My first priority with ‘stats’ will be to help you identify the opportunities within your photography portfolio, then more will come to picWorkflow soon 
The list
The font-size is an indicator of the search share, and if you mouse-over you’ll see the exact picNiche rating and the search-share for that phrase (proportional percentage to this specific dataset). I’ve also grabbed picNiche ratings from the picNiche database for a lot of these terms, and highlighted those which represent opportunities.
The search phrases are mostly english-language though there are a few non-english in there, I think I caught all the spammy ones (people it seems, LOVE to search for pornography… not surprising, but a bit of a pain to filter). I’ll steer clear of analysis at this point, though please leave a comment and let me know what you think.
As far as I know, no stock photography agency (microstock or traditional) has put out anymore than their top 25 to top 50 searched terms (though AlamyMeasures is relatively interesting)… so here it is… THE list of stock photo buyer searches:
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29 Comments
This is a great list, thanks for your effort!
Did you use only data available for the public (i.e. from Shutterstock, Fotolia, etc.) or some disclosed search data as well? And do you consider the search data from the picniche-website as “buyer searches” as well or only from the “picniche buyer plugin” (if used at all)?
Bye, Robert
Thanks
All data is from actual image-buyer’s searches through the several search addons (firefox and chrome), plugins (wordpress and ajax) and websites (stockphotofeeds and a couple of other small ones) that I run.
Such information can be very misleading when taken at face value. I would want to know where the data came from and how they get their traffic. I see a large number of terms that suggest the search audience is not geared towards finding stock photography but are average people looking for free, fun photos to look at and download.
As someone who knows the stock photography business pretty well and also knows how to use search terms I find this dataset to be of very limited use. However, by using such data in conjunction with Google’s Keyword Tool and adding “stock photos” (EX: business stock photos vs 1984 michael radford stock photos) it is possible to ferret out some of the more useful terms found here…but hardly worth the time.
Heya Fred
The data comes from my search tools and sites (as mentioned in the comment above and in previous posts), and from several other site’s tools who use stockphotofeeds as an api to their own search tools. It is primarily sourced from image-buyers searching for microstock images (about 20% of my data comes from a free-image search toolbar) so primarily the bias of this data is towards the long-tail (ie. not corporations).
I won’t go into detail about why the info in this list is primarily relevant to the readership of this blog, but in brief: the corporate market is NOT the be-all and end-all of stock photography. Whilst sites such as your own (limited library, traditional pricing) appeal primarily towards corporate-clients, the vast majority (by volume) of image-license sales today are at microstock-prices, to microstock customers. With microstock agencies developing their market and ‘pricing up’, there is likely to be a lot of cross-over in future between microstock markets/topics and traditional media-sales.
I should also note that stock photo searches do not directly coincide with google search analysis (partly because the google-data ‘transparency floor’ is far too high for analysis in the long tail). The opportunites highlighted here are determined from real microstock image sales data, not merely vague search data.
If you want to understand more about how this data can be relevant to your market, please read a little more around the blog (particularly the tips section or my interviews given to other sites on how to understand and use picNiche data to improve image-sales), I think you’ll find it has a lot more value than you initially thought
Thanks for the feedback
Bob
On a related note. I invite you (and anybody else with a traditional image-licensing agency) to release their own search data, everyone who reads the picNiche blog would be interested in finding out what your buyers are searching for
As a picture-library website developer, I wonder if “Dog” is so high because EVERYONE I know uses “Dog” as their test search. I have no clue why that is — possibly because it’s so easy to type — but we see tons of “Dog” searches that are actually just testing of the sites. It is the word I myself use every time on every site.
I use cheese or socks, and a friend of mine uses fish. It’s a funny world
Out of context, his ‘use’ of fish could have been explained better
hehe
Yep – funnily enough I tend to use “India”, “Japan”, “Colombia” etc!
A fascinating, and diverse, list. I wonder who in the world is searching for stock photos using some of these search terms? I’m tempted to put together a profile and write a short story …
It’s awesome that you’re getting this information out to people, so many thanks! I looked over the list and I was mystified by some of them. A few I didn’t even recognize as words and looked them up
One that caught my attention was “gadis bugil bamilk”. I didn’t find it in a dictionary so I did a search on google which only returned 4 entries total. I was wondering if you could explain the mechanics such that a term like this is in a list of top 1000 keywords? Is it possible that one user may have searched repeatedly for this term thus raising it on the frequency list?
Thanks again for posting this – this information always raises the bar, which is a good thing.
Those are two seperate searches (‘gadis bugil’ and ‘bamilk’) I assumed they were either a direct foreign language word/phrase, or an anglicisation of one.
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All searches are filtered by the originating IP address (so searches by the same person won’t count unless performed repeatedly on new net connections (or intentionally through varying proxies)), or by the date/time of the search where IP is not available.
It’s also possible it is regional slang or something related to a regional news event (it could be a place/name/etc). I thought it was an odd one, but it was searched quite a bit so I left it in (I just figured that ‘I’ didn’t know what it meant, but someone else may
A little research… a “gadis bugil” is (i think) a hot indonesian girl.
Thanks for publishing this information and the source from which it was derived. Quite helpful in providing insight to buyer behavior.
“Justin Bieber” beat “nudes”? HA!
great data. i love it when people share quality information like this.
is there anyway to see or get some kind of “location” data on where the buyer performed the search from? that would help to know what buyers around the world were looking for in specific markets. if not no worries but as always very very nicely done.
Thanks John
I don’t have any specifics per search (I’d have to buy a reliable GeoIP source but might worth figuring something out in future when the dataset is more developed (and I’m not quite so skint
)), but as a very general idea (ballpark estimates based on what I know about the people who use my tools):
40% North America
30% Europe & Russia (pretty even east/west split, though mostly english in use)
15% Middle East and Far East
10% South America
5% Random/Unknown
I expect agency demographics to be more-or-less the same. Figures on US-source earnings from those agencies which share them with contributors are (at least for my own image-sales) about 30% US-source, which I guess when you factor in Canada would probably give about the same 40% I am seeing.
A lot of this is totally unbelievable! I shoot international travel, and it really seems to be unlikely that there’s more search for Winnipeg that any other city in the world – not to mention many other extremely marginal words and expressions. Don’t waist your time basing your shooting on this!
Heya Joe
Please see the comment above for why this seems to be unintuitive, I assure you, these searches are accurate, just not particularly corporate-focussed due to the fields in which my software/tools are most used.
On your second point, I agree, whilst these are most-searched, only those marked as presenting an opportunity are ‘really’ worth shooting new images for, the rest are saturated markets (ie. supply currently outstrips demand). The picNiche.com search analytics tools can help determine the actual value of each of these terms.
As a photographer’s assistant, thank you very much for what you do to push this data to the people who utilize it!
It’s interesting the difference in BUSINESS, bussiness, and bussines
Fabulous list – thanks! Is this something you can now generate automatically, or does it require a lot of hand manipulation?
If it can be generated automatically, I think this would be an excellent addition to your website — a page where this list is updated monthly perhaps.
Heya Burt
It starts as a pretty complex database-query drawing from several sources, but I apply a lot of common-sense filters to the queries (mainly to remove spammy terms, adult stuff, or anything particularly time-relevant: news events or big releases (iphone, ipad, etc) tend to peak on searches for only a few weeks so would have little relevance in a list like this.
The picNiche.com homepage lists recent top photo niches and is worth keeping an eye on, and the historical record for the picNiche twitter account has some interesting stuff there too (I will reactivate it when I have time to write the new oauth code).
Right: Nude girls, vulvas, cheerleading and pillows… are we still talking microstock??
Some of the traffic for these searches will not be genuine buyers, but some will, with no way to know which are which, I left these in
Hi Bob! The new list is the one you published on the beginning of this year? thanks!
Thanks for your efforts!
Amazingly useful. Thank you for your efforts.
Thanks, just getting started in stock photography and learning the ropes.
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