So I'm just wondering who really buys stock photos? As a contributor to the various stock sites you never get to see who is really buying your photos. If you are going to market your work on your own what are some of the main buys our there? Graphic designers, Media Companies, Web Designers, Marketers, Bloggers? 

In order to self promote you need to know who is buying photos in order to put together keyword advertisement.

Anyone have an idea as to what groups buy stock photos on a regular basis and what kind of general keywords might be relevant to put together a ad on google etc?

Thanks

I think there is room for marketing on Google with long tail keywords, and there are other forms of marketing. Does anyone have any specifics on buyer demographics? I have for instance one image that has sold close to 5000 times on a site so I know there are at least 5000 buyers out there but I have no idea who they are! Also what is a realistic number for possible buyers out there 100K?

Also what is a realistic number for possible buyers out there 100K?

Possible buyers worldwide for stock photos? I would say in the millions.

90-95% of all businesses + more and more regular people.

Quote from: pixel8 on August 12, 2017, 01:52

Also what is a realistic number for possible buyers out there 100K?

Possible buyers worldwide for stock photos? I would say in the millions.

90-95% of all businesses + more and more regular people.

What a fun question to play with ....

I'm going to say with 90% certainty ... Somewhere in the range of 100m - 300m

Maybe I need to refine this question, how many of that 100 Million do you think buy images with subscriptions on a  regular basis instead of on demand? 50 Million I think maybe 50 Million based on my own sales which are about 50% Subs and 50% everything else.

Maybe I need to refine this question, how many of that 100 Million do you think buy images with subscriptions on a  regular basis instead of on demand? 50 Million I think maybe 50 Million based on my own sales which are about 50% Subs and 50% everything else.

Quote from: pixel8 on August 13, 2017, 00:57

Maybe I need to refine this question, how many of that 100 Million do you think buy images with subscriptions on a  regular basis instead of on demand? 50 Million I think maybe 50 Million based on my own sales which are about 50% Subs and 50% everything else.

I suspect many do both either to top up as they've used up their subscription or because (probably increasingly rarely) they can't find a suitable image on their "main" site. Also bear in mind my old chum Pareto....of those 100m 20m probably buy 80% of all images.

Well, let's calibrate our uncertainty a bit then (I started to do this before I made my guess). We can assume that there are two main groups in the total pool of buyers; businesses and bloggers. Also, probably safe to assume that Large Enterprises are quite likely to hire an agency so this number taken from World Bank Group is a pretty good one. "A World Bank Group study suggests there are between 365-445 million MSMEs in emerging markets: 25-30 million are formal SMEs; 55-70 million are formal micro enterprises; and 285-345 million are informal enterprises." We can even use that lower number ...

Now, maybe a quarter of those use some "non-micro" service, a common one that I'm familiar with is Creative Market, we used that quite a bit at the newspaper.
Maybe 1/4 don't really have a big need for images ... Maybe a brick and mortar mom & pop store or something like that.

On to bloggers, of the 7.5 billion people in the world 1/2 are are likely to be children, 1/2 of those adults maybe live in third world countries. If we assume maybe 1% of the remaining 1.875b people have a blog that's nearly 19m in our "pool"

Now, I know that we all like to cheerfully and naively believe that everyone is honest and comes out to buy their images ... but, many don't ... and also, many probably either entirely use something like Death To Stock, MorgueFile, or their own images.

So we narrowed our SME pool down to about 182.5m ... our blogger pool down to 18.75m leaving us with a total pool of 201.25m ... If half of those are honest and buy their images, that still gives us 100m. My rather relaxed 100m-300m still seems like a good guess. Now 20% of those buy 80% of the images. The others are probably like me, and just buy one or two a month, then maybe 20 in a week. lol