02 Jul 2008 Keyword Supply and Demand with picNiche

Another promising online keyword tool has arrived in the form of picNiche.com. Designed by microstock contributor Robert Davies and some talented friends, the system provides great value while being elegantly simple. With a simple keyword search you can determine the supply and demand for images with a particular keyword or phrase.

When you search at picNiche, it connects to microstock agencies and counts how many images use your keyword or phrase (the supply) and the combined quantity of sales of those images (the demand). If you find a keyword with a low supply of competing image and high demand/sales, you’ve found yourself an opportunity.

Bob has made this task easier by providing a rating to guide you as to the attractiveness of the market for the keywords or phrases you’ve chosen. The scale marks a rating less than 10 as “bad” (oversupplied) and a rating over 100 as a “niche”.

I performed a search for a few keywords related to my best selling subject – data centers – and found the phrase “server room” returned a massive rating of 1,570.11! No wonder they’re my best selling photos.

In addition to finding under-supplied subjects, the tool can be used to help choose effective keywords for the images you’ve created. Keywording your images with keywords which returned high demand scores will, in theory, increase the sales potential of your images.

picNiche is in beta and Robert and his team have some additional features planned for the near future. It’s currently using the Fotolia API and Bob also plans to expand the number of agencies in use to broaden and better normalize the statistics.

While it won’t help you create great photos, this tool will certainly guide you as to the opportunities in the market by keywords.