Most Popular Microstock Keywords

By Steve Gibson
Written 01 June 2008
Revised 23 July 2012

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.

Analysing what sells in Microstock

Related Links

top keywords from pixmac buyers

Bookmark/Search this post with

5 Comments

Keywords

Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 2008-12-17 23:43

So everyone get your christmasy flowery backgrounds uploaded :)

keyword

Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 2009-11-11 19:37

or a medical flowery christmass

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

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.

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 :)

Most Popular Microstock Keywords