Find your niche in (micro)stock – part 2

Following up on my previous post on finding your niche in (micro)stock, I’d like to draw your attention to a very useful tool in assessing if what you have in mind is a potential niche to be explored; picNiche

Also, there is an interesting article for comparison on mystockphoto worth checking out (and not just in respect to finding your niche!).

Thanks to Roberto Marinello and Bob Davies for re-drawing my attention to this subject!

PicNiche is a simple looking tool, but it’s far more elaborate than at first meets the eye. It works very straight forward: you can enter your primary keyword or set of keywords, and it renders a few useful, yet basic, statistics after pressing the submit (analyse) button.

It’ll show you how many images, matching the criteria you entered, were found, how many views those images have generated, as well as how many times the matching images were downloaded. Essentially, this information is key to assessing if you’ve found a niche or not, but picNiche does more.

In picNiches own words:

picNiche is an easy to use keyword search tool for assessing the supply and demand of online stock photography images from microstock sites.

You search for a keyword phrase such as ‘business man’ or ‘orange socks’ and the search system assesses the sales statistics (demand) for images found relating to that search, along with the competition (supply) for that phrase, and returns a rating indicating the likelihood of making a sale as a result of that keyword phrase on your image.

The system rates keywords on an open-ended scale, so performing multiple searches will provide you with the highest rated keywords, those most likely to make a sale.

Rating < 10 is BAD
Rating > 10 and < 50 is OK
Rating > 50 and < 100 is GOOD
Rating > 100 is a NICHE

Thoughts and observations on picNiche

I believe this is a very helpful added value of picNiche. Having toyed around with it a bit, its definitely something I’ll be using frequently to select and prepare my shoots.

However, as with all tools, the information provided should be handled with care, though. The information you get out of it is as reliable as the information you’ve put in. (BS in = BS out) To illustrate this:

The niche-rating for “flower” = 0,07

If you make a typo (an obvious one in this example)

the niche-rating for “flowr” = 959.11

As picNiche makes optimal use of User Generated Content, it is also very much reliant on how other users have keyworded their images, and we all know there’s a lot of spamming going around. The consequence of this, is that very specific keywords, or sets of keywords put together with quotation marks might render a lower niche rating than more generic terms. Going too generic in search phrases, however, will also reduce the niche rating.

Example:

The niche rating for “water treatment plant” (with quotation marks) = 15,67

The niche-rating for water treatment plant (without quotation marks) = 102,02

The niche-rating for plant = 0,08

In light of the presumed higher number of purchases generated with the words “water“, “treatment” or “plant “, this makes sense. However, neither water nor treatment or plant alone necessarily refers to a “blast furnace”, thus stretching the query beyond the researched niche.

Another thing to bear in mind, is that picNiche does not seem to incorporate the actual buyer’s search terms with which the image was found and purchased – in other words, it remains very important to use common sense and try to think from a buyers perspective when choosing the keywords. Then, there is the complicating factor of iStock’s controlled vocabulary and keyword culling policies, which could well affect the results negatively.

The keyword tool picNiche offers is great to get ideas, and to check if the set of keywords entered is complete. As stated on picNiche.com:

These keywords are suggestions ONLY, any which do not describe the content of YOUR image, will NOT help your sales, and may even harm them, please use only as a guide

Needless to say, a high niche-rating is no guarantees for high sales. In the end, it comes down to the quality, composition and styling of your images, and how well they are keyworded. The line of thought:

“Hmmm; According to picNiche, “courthouse” (953 images) only has a niche-rating of 40,92, but “courthouse” AND “judge” has a niche-rating of 266,5 (282 images), so let’s get that judge there!” remains a dangerous conclusion. Adding the word “felony” to the query will reduce the niche-rating to 210,00 (2 images), however, I’m inclined to believe that’s mostly due to the scarcity of images that include all of those keywords, rather than a reduced demand for such images.

Toolbars

Another killer feature of picNiche is the firefox toolbar Bob offers. Won’t go into details here, as I couldn’t possibly top the review on microstockdiaries.com

Conclusion

Eventhough I initially looked over the tremendous potential of picNiche, I believe it’s an oustanding tool to determine niches and possible sales potential, as it is the only tool I know of that combines demand and supply in one, measurable, factor. But this only applies if handled with care and a bit of thought. I sure hope Bob Davies will continue his work on these tools, and perhaps eventually do his superb work more justice by spending a bit of time in a more fitting presentation?