Back from Japan

A quick note to say that I am back from Japan. In two weeks I managed to run out of space on my laptop hard drive and returned home with my three 4Gb cards full in addition. I averaged about 300 photos per day for two weeks so I have an enormous amount of work to do to edit for Alamy. I think I need some more storage!

Watch this space and I will try to upload some views of Japan, both picturesque and the mundane.

Alamy Measures Stats August 2008

Well, yet another busy month for Alamy as they have upgraded Measures with some teething troubles but with masses of new data to crunch. Alamy have opened up their database to the contributors so that we can see what's hot and what's not. The result is probably too much information but I'll see what I can beef up from it anyway. Here is my view of Alamy for the month of August: Proportion of searches for: 1 word = 17% , average of 11.86 pages viewed 2 words = 37% , average of 10.98 pages viewed 3 words = 35% , average of 9.65 pages viewed 4 words = 8% , average of 7.00 pages viewed 5+ words = 3% , average of 3.52 pages viewed Total number of pictures at end of month: 264 Number of sales for month: 0 Average number of my pictures viewed matching query: 2.13 Total average CTR for searches in which my images appeared: 1.01% My CTR: 1.19%

Overhead view of the Oracle roundabout on the Reading IDR (Inner Distribution Road), Berkshire, UK

Proportion of searches for: 4 letter words 19.09% 6 letter words 18.52% 5 letter words 16.81% 7 letter words 12.82% 3 letter words 10.83% 8 letter words 7.41% 2 letter words 3.99% 9 letter words 3.42% 11 letter words 3.13% 10 letter words 2.85% 12 letter words 0.85% 15 letter words 0.28% Most popular words (top 5 in each position ignoring "and"): First word: cape south national camera electricity Second word: town window gallery toilet beach Third word: UK sign bins sunset town Fourth word: UK africa edinburgh scotland sign Fifth word: tracks Most popular subjects: noisy: (neighbours OR flat) toilet: (cistern OR seat) script: (book OR paper) royal: (lifeboat OR mile) cape town: (sunset OR views) national gallery: (edinburgh OR scotland) In contrast to the stats that I can gather from my own Measures data, here is what the whole of Alamy is searching for: Most popular Alamy searches (top 5 in each position ignoring "alamy" as a search): by number of unique customers searching: globe "New York" london istanbul family by number of sales: "great ocean Road" minneapolis "monster truck" "london christmas" lidl "san francisco north beach" by number of zooms: russia "tavira portugal" Dorset "tsukiji tokyo" "rialto market" This month's conclusion for me is that in spite of my poor AlamyRank and hence lower number of views, my CTR is improving again (what some contributors call the AlamyRank yo-yo effect!). The two pseudonyms are now bedded-in and working how I wanted, AndySmyStock has a good CTR, AndySmyCreative has a poor CTR, so the more creative/abstract images are not pulling down the more obviously sellable stock images. Last month's sales were predictably a flash in the pan and I expect a drought for at least two months before my next sale otherwise I would be outperforming other far better Alamy contributors.