Something I always advocate as a microstock photographer is 'think designer' and try to learn your customers needs.

If you have a shutterstock account then you can glean a little more info on what's popular by selecting "tools and resources" > "most popular images", there you can see the most downloaded images and review a list of the most popular keywords searched for on the site. For those of you without an account (read our shutterstock review) you can see the top 100 searches ever below, obviously this will not stay up-to-date.

Update: it seems that everyone now has access to this keyword data even without a shutterstock account.

 

  • 1          flower
  • 2          christmas
  • 3          background
  • 4          medical
  • 5          family
  • 6          vector
  • 7          tattoo
  • 8          music
  • 9          woman
  • 10        baby
  • 11        business
  • 12        wedding
  • 13        beach
  • 14        computer
  • 15        fashion
  • 16        car
  • 17        logo
  • 18        grunge
  • 19        spa
  • 20        design
  • 21        golf
  • 22        abstract
  • 23        floral
  • 24        hand
  • 25        party
  • 26        tree
  • 27        tribal
  • 28        frame
  • 29        dog
  • 30        butterfly
  • 31        water
  • 32        heart
  • 33        retro
  • 34        icon
  • 35        silhouette
  • 36        love
  • 37        child
  • 38        food
  • 39        person
  • 40        flores
  • 41        girl
  • 42        house
  • 43        pattern
  • 44        border
  • 45        navidad
  • 46        sport
  • 47        globe
  • 48        fitness
  • 49        erotic
  • 50        vintage
  • 51        rose
  • 52        couple
  • 53        football
  • 54        shopping
  • 55        angel
  • 56        star
  • 57        fruit
  • 58        man
  • 59        summer
  • 60        money
  • 61        ornament
  • 62        texture
  • 63        wine
  • 64        horse
  • 65        halloween
  • 66        soccer
  • 67        nature
  • 68        coffee
  • 69        book
  • 70        kid
  • 71        cat
  • 72        3d
  • 73        school
  • 74        dragon
  • 75        office
  • 76        internet
  • 77        chocolate
  • 78        birthday
  • 79        dance
  • 80        fish
  • 81        face
  • 82        cartoon
  • 83        winter
  • 84        christmas tree
  • 85        technology
  • 86        skull
  • 87        construction
  • 88        sun
  • 89        bikini
  • 90        doctor
  • 91        art
  • 92        banner
  • 93        leaf
  • 94        eye
  • 95        massage
  • 96        dj
  • 97        spring
  • 98        paper
  • 99        yoga
  • 100      animal

 

It makes interesting reading doesn’t it, all the agencies telling you not to take pictures of flowers because they have enough... Christmas in second place, agreed it's the largest celebration in the western world (navidad creeps in at 45), but Christmas eclipses business (surprisingly low at 11th place), weddings and families. Tattoo at number 7, bizarre.

One thing to understand about shutterstock is that they mix the keywords that they receive from their different country specific sites so at certain times of the year you will see top searches of the past 7 days listing popular seasonal terms in foreign languages, at time or writing weihnachten (Christmas) is currently listed at number 27, as I understand it shutterstock translates keywords into foreign terms so keep your keywords in English.

 

Top Website Subjects

Below is a list of the top subjects for website domain re-sales in Q1 2009

1. Business
2. Acronyms and Letters
3. Media
4. Travel and Leisure
5. Shopping
6. Sports
7. Finance and Money
8. Technology
9. Society
10. Gambling
(source pdf sedo.co.uk)

This list might only be of limited use for several factors e.g. gambling is less popular than society but there is more money in it! Acronyms at position 2 is no use at all to us. Business is such a generic term, sites with such subjects might need technology images etc. One important point to think about when analysing any buyer information - the above is more a list of who your clients/buyers are, not what image subjects they need. e.g. buyers related to a gambling website could quite likely need travel/lifestyle/leisure images to illustrate a promotion.

 

Related Posts

What type of photo sell the best as microstock?

Analysing what sells in Microstock

 

Related Links

top keywords from pixmac buyers

 


Anonymous's picture

Keywords

Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 2008-12-17 23:43
So everyone get your christmasy flowery backgrounds uploaded :)
Anonymous's picture

keyword

Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 2009-11-11 19:37
or a medical flowery christmass
Steve Gibson's picture

More

Steve Gibson on Wed, 2009-11-11 23:32
"aboriginal female in hospital bed at christmas eating flowers".... if you want more like that have a look at rasmus's stock photo concept generator http://rasmusrasmussen.com/spcg/ lol
Richard's picture

Keywording is always an

Richard (not verified) on Thu, 2012-04-12 10:24
Keywording is always an interesting topic. Though a lot of microstock sites give you their top searches. My query on this subject is, how many of these searches are made by potential buyers and not other contributers doing research.
Steve Gibson's picture

who knows

Steve Gibson on Fri, 2012-04-13 23:29

I guess we'll never know that, it's clear to me that people arrive on 'image sites' with all kinds of motives other than buying - kids doing homework, travelers looking for images of what a destination is like, google even suggest that people use image search as a visual dictionary to lookup words and phrases. The 'questionable' searches you see in the top search results (frequency suppressed) suggests that plenty of people are indeed search of images of the Internets most popular search subjects :)


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