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19. What sells best ?
19.1. Typical Stockphotos
The best sellers are often typical stockimages. Good selling images are also mostly generic so that can be used for many purposes. Or to say it with the words of Hidesy from my interview with her :
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a good stockphoto has mostly a simple setup
but is always meaning and visually appealing |
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I also asked Lise Gagne which stockphotos tend to sell good, and this was her answer :
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Simple images are most of the times the best, they can be used in many concepts. I guess that's why white background image tend to sell better than artsy ones. And of course, an image must 'speak' of itself. |
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Of course it is always difficult to predict wether a picture will sells or not. This depends of more factors than only the image itself. But in general you could say that an image has to be able to express or represent something in order to sell well.
Ask yourself one of the following questions :
1. Which product could be represented by my picture ?
2. Where could my picture be used for ?
3. Would I buy this image myself ?
If you can't give an clear answer to these questions, your photo is not likely to become a topseller.
Interesting Read :
click here for an long article on iStock named : "Are you taking snapshots" about the difference between snapshots and stockphotos
Interesting Read :
click here for an article on Crestock named : "Eight Secrets from the World’s Top Selling Photographer" were Yuri Arcurs gives his ideas about what stockphotography is and how you can improve your own images.
19.2. Do your own research
Most sites lists their most popular files. You could browse them those pages and they will give you immediately an idea of what sells and what does not.
Underneath I give you some links to those pages :
1. Top 50 at shutterstock
2. Most popular at iStockphoto
3. Best sellers at Dreamstime
4. Topsellers at Fotolia
19.3. Not that kind of Photography
If you don't do this kind of photography (generic), having mostly more artsy ones, very specialized images or editorial images, chances are great you won't do that well on Microstock sites.
Although I think the best choice is to give Microstock sites a chance in almost any case, maybe some traditional agency like Alamy or PhotographersDirect will give a greater return with a specialized portfolio. ... I said maybe ...
19.4. Topseller, Low Quality
There is one thing you must keep in mind. Some images who are highly ranked, but are of a lesser quality, are already a long time for sale.
A perfect example is the image underneath. This image is the topseller on iStockphoto for the keyword : "fish". It has 3300 downloads ! Although it's an original image, technically it's far from good. You even doubt why the hell they did approve it anyway, given that they are turning down some technical far better images than this one !
But the date the picture was uploaded, July 2003, answers most of these questions. In those days, I assume the review process wasn't that though as it is now. So in this case they could live with the technical shortages of the image because of its originality, which was much more important then than the technical aspects.
Probably this image hadn't much competition in the first year(s). So I guess most of it's 3300 downloads originates in those first year(s).
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