I often mention Alexa Rank to make a comparison among microstock agencies, as you can see in Stock Agencies page. In this post I want to show another tool that can be used to follow the trends in the stock photo market, Google Trends, that lets you compare the world’s interest in some particular topics. You can see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.
First comparison, a big traditional stock agency as Corbis with the three biggest microstock agencies (value 1 is referred to iStockphoto). As you can see, in a few years the indexes are similar, after 4 years of fast growth of the microstock business. Click on the image to see the full Google page.
Second graph, with Getty Images and Corbis, shows us that the trend is the same; Getty's volume are bigger, so I didn't use it in the first comparison. Click on the image to see the full Google page.
Just published by “The Bohemian” a neat analysis of the Fall of the traditional stock photo industry.