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Author Topic: Improving discoverability  (Read 29236 times)

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Brasilnut

  • Author Brutally Honest Guide to Microstock & Blog

« on: July 28, 2017, 11:12 »
0
I'm making a huge effort to turn almost 3000 images from poor discoverability to good without spamming. Not easy. 

Anybody else had more success after doing so?

I'm using the following keywording tool which seems excellent:

https://www.keyword.io/tool/stock-photo-research


ShadySue

  • There is a crack in everything
« Reply #1 on: July 28, 2017, 11:24 »
+7
Word on the forum is that it makes no difference. I certainly won't waste my time imagining possible tangential keywords. It's  a stupid invitation to spam. Because of the way their search works, I get enough false hits there already.

Chichikov

« Reply #2 on: July 28, 2017, 11:41 »
+4
Word on the forum is that it makes no difference. I certainly won't waste my time imagining possible tangential keywords. It's  a stupid invitation to spam. Because of the way their search works, I get enough false hits there already.

I agree, it is really only a waste of time.
The only way to get the "high discoverability" is to put more that 45 keywords I think, including 10 supertags.
But most of the images (mine) don't need 45 keywords.

« Reply #3 on: July 28, 2017, 17:22 »
+2
Word on the forum is that it makes no difference. I certainly won't waste my time imagining possible tangential keywords. It's  a stupid invitation to spam. Because of the way their search works, I get enough false hits there already.
Agree also by adding "tangential" keywords you will probably reduce the ctr which might affect your ranking. This and their half hearted attempt at categories seem rather daft.

« Reply #4 on: July 28, 2017, 17:29 »
+2
I'm just slowly doing the supertags.  Only 2 images optimised out of 2800.

ShadySue

  • There is a crack in everything
« Reply #5 on: July 28, 2017, 17:39 »
0
I'm just slowly doing the supertags.  Only 2 images optimised out of 2800.

I'm not fully sure how much effect supertags are having.
Make sure you keep checking regularly, it keeps changing.
Certainly a few months back, 'supering' a tag made a files fall back quite a bit in a search for the supertag, judged by before and after checks. I don't think it's so bad now.
« Last Edit: July 29, 2017, 01:51 by ShadySue »

Justanotherphotographer

« Reply #6 on: July 29, 2017, 13:52 »
+2
I have up on it all a few months ago. I just don't make enough there to justify the time to get uploads supertaged.

« Reply #7 on: July 30, 2017, 22:26 »
+1
Word on the forum is that it makes no difference. I certainly won't waste my time imagining possible tangential keywords. It's  a stupid invitation to spam. Because of the way their search works, I get enough false hits there already.

Is that five yes to your five answers. I think so.  :) It's another carrot on a stick mission, from some stock agency.

Brasilnut

  • Author Brutally Honest Guide to Microstock & Blog

« Reply #8 on: July 31, 2017, 04:25 »
0
Certainly time consuming but if it improves sales by even 10% I think it's worth it. I did key word some in a rush the first time round.
« Last Edit: July 31, 2017, 04:29 by Brasilnut »

ShadySue

  • There is a crack in everything
« Reply #9 on: July 31, 2017, 05:06 »
+2
Certainly time consuming but if it improves sales by even 10% I think it's worth it. I did key word some in a rush the first time round.
But if even more spammy keywording leads to buyers leaving ...
As they don't have any auto-translation, it might be worth the effort to translate the main subject keywords - but it would be difficult to guess which languages would work best, unless you have an obvious bias in sales location. Certainly adding main keywords in the language of the location of images could be helpful. Though it could also clog up searches where the same word has a totally different meaning in different languages.

Brasilnut

  • Author Brutally Honest Guide to Microstock & Blog

« Reply #10 on: July 31, 2017, 05:11 »
0
Quote
it would be difficult to guess which languages would work best, unless you have an obvious bias in sales location.

That's a great tip as many of my images are in Italy it makes sense translate them to Italian to appeal to the local market :)

« Reply #11 on: July 31, 2017, 09:41 »
+1
My 400 images haven't had a sale since... let me check... oh yeah April.  And before that, I had one in January.  It's over.  I don't even waste time checking for sales, let alone jumping through more keywording hoops.   

ShadySue

  • There is a crack in everything
« Reply #12 on: July 31, 2017, 10:26 »
0
Ha! It's a members game on Alamy. I didn't have my first sale until I had over 800 files there. Still, that one was good enough to keep me uploading. Nowadays 400, even 4000 is just a drop in the ocean. I
Everyone has to make their own decisions in this game - what works for some doesn't work for others
« Last Edit: July 31, 2017, 11:33 by ShadySue »

« Reply #13 on: July 31, 2017, 11:19 »
+1
Hey,
thanks for mentioning keyword.io, I built that a while ago, happy to see it's helping!

I once made a quick test based on 30+ million stock photos in the database and there indeed was a strong correlation between the number of keywords and number of sales. In short: The more the better.

But:

1. Irrelevant keywords certainly don't help and might actually hurt by reducing your CTR
2. There might be a correlation between quality of the asset and number of keywords - more experienced and devoted artists may invest more in keywording.

So use tools like keyword.io to find keywords that you might have missed otherwise, but don't try to fill up all slots with tangential stuff :)

Also, make sure to optimise your title/description and use the most relevant keywords there, too. Basic search engine optimisation...

« Reply #14 on: July 31, 2017, 16:10 »
+2
Hey,
thanks for mentioning keyword.io, I built that a while ago, happy to see it's helping!

I once made a quick test based on 30+ million stock photos in the database and there indeed was a strong correlation between the number of keywords and number of sales. In short: The more the better.

But:

1. Irrelevant keywords certainly don't help and might actually hurt by reducing your CTR
2. There might be a correlation between quality of the asset and number of keywords - more experienced and devoted artists may invest more in keywording.

So use tools like keyword.io to find keywords that you might have missed otherwise, but don't try to fill up all slots with tangential stuff :)

Also, make sure to optimise your title/description and use the most relevant keywords there, too. Basic search engine optimisation...

How does one do a "quick test" of 30 million images?  And where would one get these sales figures?
« Last Edit: July 31, 2017, 16:18 by stockastic »

« Reply #15 on: August 01, 2017, 10:13 »
0
Secret of trade ;)

But that's the data I gathered for http://www.keyword.io/tool/stock-photo-research into a big database, so it's a matter of minutes to run such queries on.

« Reply #16 on: August 01, 2017, 10:30 »
0
Secret of trade ;)

But that's the data I gathered for http://www.keyword.io/tool/stock-photo-research into a big database, so it's a matter of minutes to run such queries on.


But where do you get the sales figures? Top sites don't show or release these. Alamy doesn't release this data.

Personally I've found that good accurate specific keywords will get better sales than "more keywords" just for the sake of having more words. Imagine if you are a buyer and wanted a photo of something? What would you search for? That's the words to include, not obscure or random similar or minor details that aren't the main subject.

Too many people think there's some game to making sales, when the answer is honest and straight forward. Good accurate keywords work best. And yes I've tested my own images, against my own images of similar photos. Next time you upload something of a series, make ten with basic words, precise, make ten with many keywords, make ten more with all kinds of obscure and related words. Then wait a month and look at where they appear in the search.

I promise, less words, more accurate, will be ranked highest at most sites. This assumes that the repeating words are the same number of instances, because that has an effect at some sites.

« Reply #17 on: August 01, 2017, 10:55 »
+1
Some agencies do publish those numbers in their APIs, although you may not see those on their websites.

First of all a big disclaimer: I am not selling photos myself so all I say is from looking at statistics and educated guesses.

I totally agree that quality > quantity and to be very clear: Keywording tools should be used to find more _relevant_ keywords, not just max out the amount of allowed keywords.

That doesn't mean, that you shouldn't add very *generic* keywords, too, though.

For the fun of it I just looked for the most frequent keywords in the database, see end of post.

12.5% of images have the keyword "background". Further analysis shows, that 79.566% of assets with that keyword have 0 sales while 80.076% of ALL assets have 0 sales. Now I don't want to do the math to test if that's scientifically significant, but I would make the case that generic keywords don't hurt your sales. Other top keywords rank around 79.5 - 80.5, too.

Which makes sense to me intuitively - you will never rank for "background" or if your CTR would be crap, but your average buyer won't search just for "background" but for "dense forest background" - where your picture "dense forest" picture will get its chance once you add the generic "background" keyword.

(Another shameless pluck: check out http://www.keyword.io/tool/fotolia-longtail-finder to get ideas of actual search phrases based on fotolias's autosuggest. It's far from being as good as google's though, so you might want to have a look at that, too...)


Here's some raw data of the 100 most frequent keywords:

Code: [Select]
[
          {
            "key": "background",
            "doc_count": 4591388
          },
          {
            "key": "white",
            "doc_count": 3987768
          },
          {
            "key": "nature",
            "doc_count": 2484515
          },
          {
            "key": "isolated",
            "doc_count": 2435124
          },
          {
            "key": "beautiful",
            "doc_count": 2413848
          },
          {
            "key": "people",
            "doc_count": 2229395
          },
          {
            "key": "design",
            "doc_count": 2127786
          },
          {
            "key": "illustration",
            "doc_count": 1904740
          },
          {
            "key": "blue",
            "doc_count": 1888078
          },
          {
            "key": "green",
            "doc_count": 1886371
          },
          {
            "key": "young",
            "doc_count": 1874181
          },
          {
            "key": "woman",
            "doc_count": 1753721
          },
          {
            "key": "red",
            "doc_count": 1703703
          },
          {
            "key": "person",
            "doc_count": 1669872
          },
          {
            "key": "female",
            "doc_count": 1655572
          },
          {
            "key": "summer",
            "doc_count": 1603761
          },
          {
            "key": "beauty",
            "doc_count": 1568581
          },
          {
            "key": "travel",
            "doc_count": 1563713
          },
          {
            "key": "color",
            "doc_count": 1561565
          },
          {
            "key": "business",
            "doc_count": 1536681
          },
          {
            "key": "on",
            "doc_count": 1534946
          },
          {
            "key": "food",
            "doc_count": 1525440
          },
          {
            "key": "symbol",
            "doc_count": 1462259
          },
          {
            "key": "vector",
            "doc_count": 1444441
          },
          {
            "key": "happy",
            "doc_count": 1442463
          },
          {
            "key": "concept",
            "doc_count": 1404698
          },
          {
            "key": "black",
            "doc_count": 1355581
          },
          {
            "key": "old",
            "doc_count": 1328315
          },
          {
            "key": "girl",
            "doc_count": 1328268
          },
          {
            "key": "of",
            "doc_count": 1319744
          },
          {
            "key": "sky",
            "doc_count": 1319360
          },
          {
            "key": "closeup",
            "doc_count": 1314140
          },
          {
            "key": "caucasian",
            "doc_count": 1306044
          },
          {
            "key": "in",
            "doc_count": 1288970
          },
          {
            "key": "healthy",
            "doc_count": 1281133
          },
          {
            "key": "art",
            "doc_count": 1268722
          },
          {
            "key": "man",
            "doc_count": 1267496
          },
          {
            "key": "natural",
            "doc_count": 1241623
          },
          {
            "key": "abstract",
            "doc_count": 1221299
          },
          {
            "key": "portrait",
            "doc_count": 1202016
          },
          {
            "key": "adult",
            "doc_count": 1143252
          },
          {
            "key": "fresh",
            "doc_count": 1126741
          },
          {
            "key": "water",
            "doc_count": 1102621
          },
          {
            "key": "with",
            "doc_count": 1089499
          },
          {
            "key": "style",
            "doc_count": 1071221
          },
          {
            "key": "architecture",
            "doc_count": 1053418
          },
          {
            "key": "decoration",
            "doc_count": 1051273
          },
          {
            "key": "yellow",
            "doc_count": 1034675
          },
          {
            "key": "male",
            "doc_count": 1029181
          },
          {
            "key": "landscape",
            "doc_count": 1020224
          },
          {
            "key": "sign",
            "doc_count": 1015971
          },
          {
            "key": "modern",
            "doc_count": 1014797
          },
          {
            "key": "outdoor",
            "doc_count": 997496
          },
          {
            "key": "vintage",
            "doc_count": 993881
          },
          {
            "key": "pattern",
            "doc_count": 987256
          },
          {
            "key": "cute",
            "doc_count": 981877
          },
          {
            "key": "lifestyle",
            "doc_count": 980955
          },
          {
            "key": "holiday",
            "doc_count": 979195
          },
          {
            "key": "and",
            "doc_count": 977286
          },
          {
            "key": "texture",
            "doc_count": 968744
          },
          {
            "key": "the",
            "doc_count": 961560
          },
          {
            "key": "colorful",
            "doc_count": 959809
          },
          {
            "key": "view",
            "doc_count": 948446
          },
          {
            "key": "light",
            "doc_count": 941141
          },
          {
            "key": "nobody",
            "doc_count": 937180
          },
          {
            "key": "fashion",
            "doc_count": 921896
          },
          {
            "key": "tourism",
            "doc_count": 888435
          },
          {
            "key": "icon",
            "doc_count": 885558
          },
          {
            "key": "outdoors",
            "doc_count": 884011
          },
          {
            "key": "brown",
            "doc_count": 880305
          },
          {
            "key": "building",
            "doc_count": 875284
          },
          {
            "key": "city",
            "doc_count": 867419
          },
          {
            "key": "graphic",
            "doc_count": 864338
          },
          {
            "key": "one",
            "doc_count": 853655
          },
          {
            "key": "bright",
            "doc_count": 840991
          },
          {
            "key": "retro",
            "doc_count": 839586
          },
          {
            "key": "attractive",
            "doc_count": 834603
          },
          {
            "key": "hand",
            "doc_count": 833679
          },
          {
            "key": "health",
            "doc_count": 830408
          },
          {
            "key": "technology",
            "doc_count": 819292
          },
          {
            "key": "day",
            "doc_count": 817106
          },
          {
            "key": "wooden",
            "doc_count": 781709
          },
          {
            "key": "object",
            "doc_count": 777029
          },
          {
            "key": "traditional",
            "doc_count": 770831
          },
          {
            "key": "smiling",
            "doc_count": 769664
          },
          {
            "key": "fun",
            "doc_count": 768681
          },
          {
            "key": "plant",
            "doc_count": 767075
          },
          {
            "key": "pretty",
            "doc_count": 760217
          },
          {
            "key": "wood",
            "doc_count": 738521
          },
          {
            "key": "face",
            "doc_count": 725763
          },
          {
            "key": "smile",
            "doc_count": 716028
          },
          {
            "key": "spring",
            "doc_count": 713376
          },
          {
            "key": "season",
            "doc_count": 703530
          },
          {
            "key": "tree",
            "doc_count": 698072
          },
          {
            "key": "sea",
            "doc_count": 686473
          },
          {
            "key": "paper",
            "doc_count": 681462
          },
          {
            "key": "europe",
            "doc_count": 680923
          },
          {
            "key": "culture",
            "doc_count": 667678
          },
          {
            "key": "animal",
            "doc_count": 665415
          },
          {
            "key": "home",
            "doc_count": 659297
          }
        ]

[Edited to put the data into a code section]
« Last Edit: August 01, 2017, 10:57 by rjung »

« Reply #18 on: August 01, 2017, 11:12 »
+2
I have a hard time  believing that an agency would make contributor sales figures available through a public API, even if they vetted and licensed users of that API and had them sign appropriate NDAs.

   

« Reply #19 on: August 01, 2017, 11:17 »
0
Several do. They are interested in making sales through resellers, so they give them quite a lot of data. On some you can even see the artist names...

[Edited]: To be fair, alamy.com is not part of the database, not sure if they do provide such numbers.
« Last Edit: August 01, 2017, 11:47 by rjung »

« Reply #20 on: August 01, 2017, 12:51 »
+1
Then you've given me yet another reason to never have anything to do with those "agencies" again.  Not that I needed one.

« Reply #21 on: August 01, 2017, 22:27 »
0
Several do. They are interested in making sales through resellers, so they give them quite a lot of data. On some you can even see the artist names...

[Edited]: To be fair, alamy.com is not part of the database, not sure if they do provide such numbers.

What agencies? SS, IS, FT, Alamy, 123RF, pond5, or irrelevant minor tossers.

« Reply #22 on: August 02, 2017, 06:02 »
+1
It's a mix of major and minor agencies. Feel free to read through their tech documentation yourself, it's all openly available, but please understand that I won't give any details to make it easier for the competition to copy the tool ;)

ShadySue

  • There is a crack in everything
« Reply #23 on: August 02, 2017, 15:51 »
0
I'm making a huge effort to turn almost 3000 images from poor discoverability to good without spamming.[/url]


Even less worth it now:
http://discussion.alamy.com/index.php?/topic/7987-download-packs


JimP

« Reply #24 on: August 09, 2017, 10:12 »
+2
It's a mix of major and minor agencies. Feel free to read through their tech documentation yourself, it's all openly available, but please understand that I won't give any details to make it easier for the competition to copy the tool ;)

I don't see many people who are buying your claims with no proof except you won't help the competition. What competition if no one cares about your empty tool. Show us something that means something.


 

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