Features
Do buyers use search engines more than stock agencies to find images?
On Nov 16, wrote: I am a bit worried about whether buyers actually use google and search engines to license images?While there have been no bona fide studies on the subject, one can extrapolate an answer by looking at the volume of traffic that the agencies get, vs. that of image-search sites, like images.google.com. And while you could argue that not everyone that goes to image-based search engines are necessarily looking to license photos, I would argue that the sheer volume of such users would yield a higher total number of buyers, even though they might represent a much smaller fraction of the total traffic. For example, if only .1% of google searchers would actually license an image they found for a given search, the fact that the site itself gets hundreds of millions of searches a day, even the tiny .1% that might convert into buyers would still yield a higher total than what all the photo stock agencies yield.
This all leads to one of the major assumptions that most photographers get wrong about the internet and photo agencies: that stock agencies are the only way to go, or at least, the "best" way to sell your images.
Yet, while it's clear that more potential buyers use search engines over stock agency websites for photo searches, the other side of the coin is that there are millions of more people with photos on their sites that search engines choose from, versus the thousands of photographers usually represented by a stock photo agency. The question then becomes, are your chances of getting traffic converting to sales higher on search engines, or if your photos are with a stock agency?
The two most important variables involved in this answer involve your willingness to actually make and maintain a website, and your desire (and perhaps skillset) in managing the business side of self-representation. If your thinking on these both issues is "NO" then you might think that a stock agency is for you. The other side of the coin, again, is the presumption that an agency will do better, or at least as well as you. But first, let's not stray too far from the main question at hand: "do buyers actually use search engines to license images?" If the answer is yes, then this may tip the hand over to the do-it-yourself side of the question of where your images should reside.
To use my site as strictly anecdotal evidence, I get 20,000-30,000 visitors a day, and of those who license images, only a small handful even knew that "stock photo agencies" existed in the first place. My point isn't to suggest that your site can also get that kind of traffic--it's merely to point out that of the large amount traffic I get, a small fraction of these people are aware that formal "stock agencies" exist. And while this is anecdotal evidence not to be construed as "proof," it lends credence to the premise at hand: that search engines are used more than agencies by the masses, rather than focused publishing and advertising communities who are the primary buyers of images from agencies.
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The above is an excerpt from Dan Heller's Photography Business Blog to finish reading the original article click here.
Click here for Dan Heller's bio.
Posted in: Features, Photographers, Stock Photo Companies
