I don’t normally post about my stats or the performance of my portfolio on iStockphoto.com, but I thought this was kind of interesting.
When the swine flu news started ramping up, I did a set of images and got them into my portfolio, as I mentioned back here. One of them started selling immediately.
It sold 11 image licenses the first day it was searchable. “Great!”, I thought. I’ve got a rocket here. Alas, it was not meant to be. After a few days of hot sales, as the news died down, so did the interest. And it wasn’t due to the similars from other people that popped up on iStockphoto. Below, I put the download chart from April 29 through today over the chart for “swine flu” from Google Trends, showing searching interest. It’s pretty clear that worldwide interest in swine flu has disappeared. Luckily, I seem to have nailed the peak on April 30th. Blue is Google Trends, and green is my iStockphoto downloads.
I just found it interesting how closely they match up. Well, it was fun while it lasted.
I saw that masked pig doing well and wanted to jump in on the action. I couldn’t get a decent shot that I liked though, so I gave up. Within a few days, the 2 page search results for “swine flu” turned into 25 pages… Seems despite the media increasing the sensationalism, the hype has died.