Thursday, July 21, 2011

My Getty Images Sales Report And Hope On The Horizon


Cash flow picture of a faucet with money and water pouring out.
Older images, such as this "cash flow" pictures, made a bit of a comeback in my most recent Getty Images sales report. 

My Most Recent Getty Images Sales Report and Higher Revenue
I noticed on my most recent Getty Images sales report that not only was my revenue higher than it has been in a while, but I made more sales with some of my older images. Actually, I made quite a few sales with older images that haven’t sold well for some time now (such as the cash flow image seen above). My share of the royalties for images between six and twenty years old came out to $4,707.80. That is almost twice as much as similarly aged images have been earning me recently. That was for 34 sales…so I had an average of $138.00 per sale for those oldies but goodies. I would call that hope on the horizon!

Newest vs. Best Match
So is this some singular stroke of good fortune, or is something else in play here? I honestly don’t know the answer, but I do have a possibility that I would really like to believe!  Getty recently added the ability to filter a search by toggling between “newest” and “Best Match”.  I am hoping that the “Best Match” option is getting some of my older, but well-selling images, back up higher in the searches results with a corresponding increase in revenue.

Great Selling Images and The Sea of Mediocrity
In an unscientific test I played around with searching for my own images with the two different “filters”. It did seem that using Best Match did bring up some of my older images more quickly. Dare I hope that this is actually the answer and that on the whole great images will get a boost over the vast sea of mediocrity that is threatening to drown us all? I better knock on some wood!

Stay Tuned For Next Month
Of course, as I point out, my experiments are hardly scientific, my Getty Sales Report may return to its previous state next month, and one month’s results are never enough to base anything on. But one can hope! I will report further after next months report comes out.


2 comments:

Marco Venturini-Autieri said...

One of the most discussed, as well hated, topics on Getty's iStock forums, is indeed the Best Match algorithm. You either hate it or love it...
Marco

John Lund said...

Marco,

On iStock they have by number of downloads as well...right? With the Getty BEST MATCH you still can't figure out which image to "copy"...I think....

Thanks!

John

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