Most popular microstock keywords - 2017

We have just analyzed metadata of over 1.5 million microstock photos and illustrations. It's time to share some statistical data!

Firstly, let's see what keywords are mostly used by contributors.

It seems that about 30% of assets contain white background. About 20% of photos contain people, mainly women. About 16% of works are pictures of nature. About 15% of assets are devoted to business subject. Popular colors: white, blue, green, black, red and yellow. However, what themes are customers interesting to? For every keyword, we have calculated total number of downloads for assets, which contains that keyword. Let’s sort our data by this parameter.

It is quite similar. Maybe contributors know what customers are buying? Now we will calculate average downloads to see how competition will change the picture. To minimize statistical error we will take only keywords that used at least 1500 times.

This diagram shows that such kind of assets as illustrations, vectors, icons and textures are still very profitable. Popular themes: silhouettes, family, pets, activity, love and etc (see below). Interesting, that such keyword as “e” (something electronic? internet stuff?) is on top, but we don’t think it is good idea to add so short keywords. Keywords “white” and “background” take only 2483 and 2531 places respectively – it shows very big competition in this kind of assets. At the end of the article, we have attached list of top 1000 keywords so you can make your own conclusions.

Hope, that statistic will help you to get some new ideas about your future works and increase your income. We have integrated that statistical data in our IMS Keyworder. This keywording tool shows rank of each suggested keyword with color circle (white – too few data, gray - low rank, yellow – not so low, green – average, blue – good, violet - top rank) so you can choose only profitable keywords for your works.

Download top 1000 keywords preferred by customers (CSV)

What about 2018 year?

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