What are the photographic and illustration subjects that clients look for most often? Recently, iStockphoto surveyed its customers and asked them to identify the subject categories that they searched for most frequently in 2012. See the
iStockphoto infographic.
Over 1,000 clients responded. They were able to select multiple categories and were asked to order them in terms of frequency. The chart below lists the top 20 categories in the order of greatest importance with 73% of the respondents indicating that they most often looked for pictures that contained people.
| |
Percent |
Images in |
|
| |
Responded |
collection |
|
| People |
73 |
1,723,260 |
|
| Business |
68 |
699,180 |
|
| Concepts |
67 |
571,265 |
|
| Lifestyle |
58 |
708,382 |
|
| Medical |
42 |
325,350 |
|
| Multicultural/Ethnic |
36 |
91,251 |
177,001 |
| Science/Technology |
35 |
88,216 |
378,865 |
| Beauty/Health |
33 |
1,696,913 |
726,389 |
| Food/Beverage |
27 |
1,122,771 |
248,858 |
| Holidays/Celebrations |
27 |
1,043,997 |
331,790 |
| Travel/Transportation |
26 |
990,536 |
254,439 |
| Animals/Pets |
22 |
570,065 |
149,203 |
| Babies/Children |
22 |
211,541 |
619,621 |
| Sports/Games/Fitness |
21 |
404,604 |
465,682 |
| Fine Art |
21 |
5,488 |
|
| Historical/Vintage |
21 |
290,310 |
472,648 |
| Music/Entertainment |
16 |
164,332 |
104,608 |
| Homes/Interiors |
14 |
537,044 |
676,317 |
| Religious/Spiritual |
9 |
258,688 |
184,251 |
| Space/Military |
6 |
80,871 |
59,639 |
We have also listed the number of images currently in the iStock collection that contain the respective keywords. (Where there are two words in the description the count in the first column is for the first word and the count in the second column for the second word. In Sports/Games/Fitness we counted Sports and Fitness.)
Obviously, many images will contain several of these keywords so one image may be counted in several different categories. Images that can be legitimately keyworded with several of the popular categories tend to be among the most frequently licensed.
It is interesting that that the word “computer” is not among the top 20, although iStock has 230,172 images keyworded computer. Hopefully, all of them are also keyworded “technology.”
The survey also revealed that 98% of all creatives use stock imagery sometime in the year. This figure is up from 79% in 2000.
In regards to illustration vs. photos, iStock found that 72% of those surveyed use stock illustration, while 98% use stock photos. 33 percent use stock footage and 14 percent use stock audio.