Sharing sales data

January 11, 2008 by pmelcher.

A funny thing happened recently. One of the top microstock agency, Dreamstime, has decided to lift part of the veil on sales data. As an additional tool given to their contributor, they are now showing what keyword generated a download, thus a sale, of their image.

It is a great tool for contributors, albeit a double edge one. One could be tempted to use it for “keyword spamming”, the art of putting the wrong keyword to an image, in the hopes it will be seen, and eventually bought. A plague for microstock platforms. But what is new and challenging is Dreamstime decision to share part of its sales data.

The history of photo agencies and most recently sales platform has always been the opposite. In order to keep contributors with them, no one shared valuable sales data. It was, and is, proprietary information. A bit like enslaving someone by depriving him of knowledge. Getty, Corbis or JupiterImages, along many, many others would never dare make such a move for fear that their contributors would use that information to feed someone else, such as the competitions’ image database. And that will happen to Dreamstime, since exclusive contributors are maybe around 10% of their pool.

In a slide and phone world, that would have been quasi impossible . Requests for images did not come in the form of one or a sequence of one words. Thus photo agencies would have had a very hard time sharing that information. With websites, all this is different, obviously. But it still remains a very well guarded secret.

The real question is how is this useful ? Well, for one, it will bring a succesful microshooter valuable data on what types of keywords are entered for search. And which ones are the most entered and referred to their images. It will not, however, give a full picture. And that can be highly deceiving. It is not because I sold 100 images thanks to the keyword “butterfly” that this keyword is the most used in searches. It just probably means that I have the most relevant images of butterflies. Since it will not give all keywords, it will not help putting keywords you forgot to put in. For example, if my specialty is photographing fruits and I systematically forgot to put the keyword “fresh”, it will not show me how many sales I missed, if any.

Contributors reaction to this tool has been overwhelming positive and I command Dreamstime for making this available. It is a gutsy move to give photographers access to their sales data. It might, or will, force other microstock companies to do the same. Eventually, it might even force traditional agencies to follow and share more of their information. Their is a value for photographers to be less blind to the markets demand, while there is danger in using past sales to predict or influence future sales. It is not because a keyword has done well in the past that it will do well in the future and the risk is having more of the same image ad nausea. But this is more in a trend that is seeing more power given to photographers. And that is a good thing.

ON a completely unrelated note : Digg.com labs has released a image visual tool which allows to see, real time, what images are being voted. It has no practical usage that I can see but yet is very interesting.

Posted in Search, IPTC, Jupiter, digg, technology, keyword, web 2.0, getty, Royalty free, corbis, filter, prosumer, Microstock | Print | 4 Comments »