Wondering where the market is going ?

November 27, 2007 by pmelcher.

Just a quick snapshot of the evolution of traffic on the big three ( Corbis, Getty and Jupiter ) + Istockphoto. For those who were wondering where their traffic was going, here is a good indication.

Since Alexa rankings can be a little tricky since they rely only on people who have downloaded the Alexa toolbar, I ran the same analysis on competition site compete.com:

Now, if we take data from both we see:

- Istockphoto is growing and growing fast. It has more traffic than any of the big three. It doesn’t mean, however, that they have more sales but it certainly helps.

- JupiterImages is growing. In both charts. We could conclude that it  is a confirmation of Alan Meckler startegy.

- GettyImages, besides Istockphoto.com, is dropping. In both charts. In the Compete.com chart, JupiterImages  has actually more traffic than  Getty.

- Corbis is flat.

What does this all mean ? Well, not much really. Both Compete.com and Alexa.com work by tracking usages pattern of anyone who has downloaded their plug ins. These plug ins are mostly used by individuals at home because most companies will not allow you to download anything on your office computers. Furthermore, heavy web users, like image buyers, tend to avoid anything that would slow down their surfing experience, especially anything that tracks their movements.

So why post it ? Because I love graphs / charts.  These look very dramatic, don’t you think? it really looks like the whole commercial stock industry has gone Istockphoto crazy. But then, maybe it has.

Posted in Jupiter, alexa, No sense, corbis, getty, Microstock | Print | No Comments »