All of Alamy Theories

Japanese coins in a bottle
I've titled this as All of Alamy Theories since that should avoid any abuse, but also because this analysis is based on only a week of Alamy Measures data and I'm supposing that this can give enough information to suggest a trend!

People searching for everyday subjects have the least patience for searching

This theory is based on the top searches on Alamy. This week the top searches started with "woman", "child", "man", "christmas", "children", "family", "school", "young", "old", or "red". With the exception of "christmas" and "red", I would expect these words to come out top every week in terms of the number of unique customer occurrences (all have 100 or more searches in a week). The subject "woman" has a possible 1,683,703 results, which even when qualified with another word gives about 10,000 results on average. However, these top subjects get less than 400 views by each unique customer, that's approximately 4 pages viewed. It's as if the customer has an expectation to find what they want on popular subjects without digging. This theory stands for the top 173 subjects, which received less than 7 pages of views on Alamy, which this week were:

woman child man christmas children family school young old red car dog london new couple the computer business boy teenager van mexico PEOPLE white snow san money water black traffic uk female lake baby police house girl india ST green city shopping great teen office dubai modern hotel florida hospital chinese North Person beer john vietnam Texas building Virginia african la horse british spain Gold asian broken River kids french teenage father open sports south one student hand digital male human Ice women cat winter eiffel switzerland fish big manchester japan home obama empty vintage australia two russia credit beach small road rock shanghai dublin COSTA BUSINESSMAN drinking china Indian night paper video american wolf mother metal book Earth Russian english senior University glass moon coffee older mobile royal sun fiji blue back hispanic chocolate polar construction happy St. Italian sydney high window World street maldives teenagers party supermarket table doctor bermuda hurricane group james nurse students hot Electric animal shop champagne native vegetable BUS air classroom cafe football crowd TREE adult apple

Theory: To sell stock photos of popular subjects you need to have pictures on the first four pages of the results on Alamy. To achieve this takes a good Alamy Rank and if you don't have a good rank, you may not be best placed to cover these subjects

There are popular subjects where searchers will spend longer searching when the subject is more specific

This theory is based on the lower ranks of the most popular searches on Alamy. This is perhaps the best place to look for subjects as there is plenty of demand and although possibly plenty of images, the searchers appear to spend longer looking, an average of 13 pages. These subjects probably change each week so the following is only an example:

telescope Havana poland cup cabbage perspective damascus corridor laptop orca huayna Malaysian atm workman asia smiling satellite ljubljana pollenca byzantine Sarawak sixties hammock porridge multicultural designer positive chile hungary morecambe celebration valencia taoist bend mann caribbean blues wrist Sharm honeycomb calcutta botanist connection Crutches Mountain stretching dead Anatomy shadow elementary kindergarten boobs x Olives guatemala salvador photos support backgrounds forest CHURCH fir aquarium greenhouse doll seattle caravan volleyball Cayman Bangkok cider panda machu penguins surfing ball baseball active community malaysia beetle Tatra jail balanced sunrise wristwatch marble stormy tango picture fuerteventura lips Sabah volcanic breasts stone Hawaii award savings fisherman gymnastics nova puzzle feather venice

Theory: More specific but still popular subjects are perfectly accessible by lower ranked contributors on Alamy - particularly conceptual images where the searcher will spend lots of time looking in the lower pages

There are popular searches which go unanswered on Alamy

In the lower ranks of the popular searches on Alamy are a number of subjects which return no results. These subjects will vary each week but consistently go unanswered. There is a good deal of misspelling and poor english in this area but that is not to say that the searches are invalid. There is clearly an opportunity to fulfill these requests with no competition at all. There were 119 subjects this week which fell into this category as follows:

Blowholes amazonen junio "Marrakech "pioneers" Cabo chritmas del eyl Hilditch Kenneth Kingda musso neolithic rusizi teenagerd vegatable 1963 A/B aaron Avenida Avranches AX30DWpeople Barrios Berberis 'bill blathnaid brazillian bruno buddha buddhamonton businessperson canna Caroline chewit chil Chines chritsmas colage collage Collapsing columbines compter consoda daithi dart dava debretts 'Dutch dzanga-sangha elasticated elephans ELY, emilie eucalypt frederik freston Gilboa gus hameau Heliocidaris Hgirl highly hotle hstern Hsuehshan Ibn icleand iiza Isaiah Jebisseh judge Kamalame Kazimiercz kim kiviak, Kleburg konstruktion latvian leke Lev loose louguan Meadowhall menie milage mosesberg MUNICIPAL munk na nasser neptune Noel Oparach owner Poste poundbry preda Prestes Prima process reservoir retangular rouelette roza Sakalava samuel sant Sheila stawberry stefani stopped tenn trafficcongestion tricyrtis Wesminster woddy zhinan

Theory: This one is more about keywording than shooting. When you keyword you need to think out of the box, which All of Alamy will help with, and use appropriate, unambiguous misspellings