MicrostockInsider

After some murmurings yesterday about new owners on microstockgroup, an official announcement has now been emailed to current crestock members.

as of 1 July 2010 crestock is now part of the masterfile corporation, masterfile have been in the licensing business for almost 30 years. In the statement they basically outline the fact that they wanted a microstock site and crestock was ripe for the picking.

MicrostockDiaries recently announced the launch of MicrostockCharts.com. It's a service that allows microstock photographers to record and plot graphs of their earnings. I guess the best way to learn about it is to read the full post on microstockdaires.

At the moment microstockcharts is simply a way for you to manually enter your monthly earnings, portfolio size and number of downloads etc. then plot graphs of RPI earnings and downloads. There is an option to make your charts public if you want to share them e.g. posting a link to your sales history on a forum.

After yesterday unveiling thinkstockphotos (announced late last year as the 'new Getty subscription site') Getty have announced that Stockxpert will close with almost immediate effect.

Stockxpert Buyers

Credits are no longer being sold on stockxpert, nor can new buyers register. Those with existing credits on SXP can transfer them on a 1:1 basis for credits on istockphoto.

A couple of days ago there was a post on the lookstat blog titled top search keywords for energy, it compared search terms in Google in an attempt to estimate popularity of energy images on microstock sites. Earlier this year I did something similar in a post about seasonal stock images, and at the time I made the point that I wasn't exactly sure how well Google search terms related to searches on microstock sites.

So that set me thinking... (yes, be very afraid) Just exactly how much of a match is google trends/adwords data to what people are searching for at microstock sites? Clearly there will be some relationship, but I'd also guess that there are lots of popular terms that will not have a proportionate number of microstock searches. It's difficult to know how similar the two are. Is it reasonable to assume that popular keywords in Google are more likely to lead to more microstock sales as those keywords make popular subjects hence there will be related businesses in need of such images? As they say "assume makes an ass out of u and me".