NEW PARADIGM SHIFTS IN STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY - PART II (Continued) COMPARING MARKETING & WEB TRAFFIC (of the four featured marketplaces) Below are some comparisons we've used to rate the four online marketplaces we've featured in this article. We've also added Alamy, along with Getty (Getty Images) and Corbis for comparison. (Many consider Getty and Corbis to be the two top stock image suppliers in the world. Some have even estimated that those two agencies supply as much as 50% of all the stock images that are sold, and the hundreds of other agencies and online marketplaces compete for the other half!): ALEXA.COM TRAFFIC RANKINGS: Alexa.com is sort of the "Nielsen Ratings" of the Web (smaller numbers are better -- for instance Yahoo.com has a traffic ranking of "1"):
YAHOO POPULARITY RANKING: Yahoo's "Stock Photography" directory page currently lists 264 Web sites (agencies and photographer sites) by popularity ("The order of web sites or web documents is based upon Yahoo! Search Technology. ...Sites that are most popular with users or the most relevant to the category appear at the top of the site listings."). Here is Yahoo's current ranking order:
PAGE RANK (Google PageRank"ing"): If all factors are equal, the Web site with the highest PR will usually appear above those with lower page rankings in Google Search Engine results. Higher numbers are better here, and are ranked between "0" to "10":
What is PageRank? Google says, "Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank ...This distinctive approach to ranking Web sites enables the highest quality pages to appear first", and that PageRank is "...an indicator of an individual page's value." For more information, go to: http://www.google.com/technology/ You can check your own Web site's PageRank here: http://www.pagerank.net/pagerank-checker/ LINK POPULARITY. These are the number of outside Web pages that link in to a domain name - they can be a good indicator of Web site popularity - however, they do not always tell the "quality" of those links ("PageRank" is an indicator of the quality of these links - see above). Higher numbers are better here:
*AcclaimImages.com has grown from about 170,000 links to this current number in less than 30 days; however, their PageRank (quality of links) has not increased during this same period. A rapid increase in link popularity can set off a link "spamming" alarm by Google, and drop the site's page ranking: http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/text6-10-2005-71368.asp You can check your own Web sites Link popularity here: http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop/ -or- http://www.pagerank.net/link-popularity-checker/ KEYWORD RANKING: All of the above comparisons don't mean a thing, if the Web sites are not getting the RIGHT Web traffic. To receive the best image buying traffic, a Web site must have a high page ranking on the right keywords. Currently, the number one keyword phrase that brings in the most relevant traffic is "stock photography". The number two phrase is "stock photo(s)". Several thousand searches are done each day on these two phrases through the major Internet Search Engines. You can enter these and other phrases via this tool to see and compare daily traffic: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ Naturally, companies are trying hard to optimize their Web site and position themselves as high as possible on the search engine results, so that they can receive as much click through traffic on these two keyword phrases. Currently, there are about 45,000 Web SITES (with over 8 million Web pages) actively trying to optimize their site just for the keyword phase "stock photography"! You can find out this statistic by doing the following operator function in the Google search: [intitle:"stock photography" inanchor:"stock photography"] (enter this without the brackets). This is intense competition! Whether a site is rated highly or not, it can always BUY its way to the top in the "sponsored" positions. (The number one and two positions for these keywords are costing right now an insane rate of about $1.75 per click-through, so you can see the value of a high-ranking, non-sponsored position. If one has to pay $1.75 per click, one would have to have a very high conversion rate, just to break even!) Your editor hired a keyword and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firm to analyze and find out who were the top 10 ranked companies right now for the most valuable keyword phrase, "stock photography", and this was their report: Top 10 Sites for the search term: "stock photography"
Keyword Ranking Comparisons (via Google.com): Here's a ranking comparison of how our four featured sites compared with Corbis, Getty and Alamy on four stock photo related keyword search terms:
B = "stock photos" C = "stock photo" D = "stock photograph" E = "stock photo agency"
*Average ranking for all five keyword phrases. Although TSSphoto.com has an "average" keyword ranking that is second only to Corbis, it should be noted that "Stock Photography" carries about three times more weight than "stock photos" and "stock photo" combined, since there are typically three times as many searches performed for "stock photography" than "stock photo(s)". And even fewer searches are performed for the other two terms. Lower numbers are better in the above comparisons. A 001-010 score places the site on the first page of the Google Search Engine results, 011-020 on the second page, and so on. A site receiving a "n/a" ranking score indicates that the site did not show up in the search result by the 25th page (or to the #250 position). OFF-LINE MARKETING: We've been comparing these four featured online marketplaces using Web statistics because these sites have positioned themselves as "online" marketplaces to sell your stock photography. However, online marketing is not the only way a Web site can get buyers to visit their site. Getty Images has proven this. Even though Corbis enjoys the #1 Search Engine position on the most sought after keywords, a greater number of photo buyers will tell you that they do more of their purchases at Getty than at Corbis. (One source example for this claim is the "Art Buyers Talk Stock" article, pp. 12-15, in Photo District News' "Stock Guide 2005".) This means that Getty is employing other sales and marketing methods to get buyers to their site, which is one reason why they out-rank Corbis in the Alexa.com traffic rankings; and it is why buyers rate Getty over Corbis in actual use -- because once a buyer gets to a site, many of the public tracking and rating statistic don't tell us what the buyer is doing at that site and how effective he is at using that site's internal search engine. One public stat that helps to confirm this is Alexa.com's "Page Views per user" (under "Traffic Details") consistently shows that Getty users search through more pages than Corbis users, and that there are THREE times more Getty Web users than Corbis users (see "Reach" under Traffic Details). While Absolute Stock Photo and My Loupe showed the lowest online stats in our comparisons, both companies claim they are investing heavily in other off-line marketing efforts (such as direct mail) to bring customers to their sites.
|