December 2009

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".