Google Trends & Microstock

I'm often curious to see trends on Google Trends, and also curious to see what I can gather from this site to better position my photography focus in future shots.  Hunting around for some various terms I came across some interesting comparisons.

General Market

Getty vs Corbis vs Microstock - Corbis seems to have been overtaken in this metric by istock around mid 2007.

Getty (red) vs Corbis (purple) vs Microstock (blue:istock, green: shutterstock, yellow: Fotolia)

Microstock Battle - istock seems to be declining slightly since the end of 2008, Fotolia seems to have a continuing upward trend, while Shutterstock seems to have had a plateau in 2009, with a spike in searches at the beginning of 2010.

Microstock Trends (blue: iStock, yellow: Fotolia , red: Shutterstock , green: Dreamstime, purple: 123rf)

Some Other Interesting Photo Topics:

Royalty Free versus Creative Commons
Film versus digital
Selling Photos versus Buying Photos

The searches above aren't exact by any means, but an interesting exercise none the less to gather a snap shot on topics.  Something to keep an eye on for ideas and research.

Monetize Your Images :: With Microstock

I've recently gotten back into the idea of monetizing my images and there are a number of options one can pursue to make money from your photos.  Microstock is one of those options...

Microstock

A contentious avenue for sales to some and one I haven't put a lot of time into.  I've been getting back into it, but slowly.  Keeping the motivation going through rejection, a large amount of time editing and keywording images, with little payoff in the beginning has been a struggle.  But I'm determined to give it a go and see where I end up - I'll be updating my progress here in future posts.

Microstock is mainly Royalty Free images requiring a model/property release (if applicable) and counts on multiple sales of the same image to recoup the cost of production due to the low cost per image in microstock.  Sales typically range from $1.00 - $20.00 per image, with only a percentage of that going to the photographer.  It is open to anyone with a decent camera (usually 4-6 mega pixels and above), but most sites have quality standards that you must meet in order to submit images for sale on their site.

A few of the major microstock sites to check out if you're interested in this:

iStockphoto
Shutterstock
Dreamstime
CanStockPhoto
Fotolia