Picniche: A Keyword-rating Engine

Wondering why your images aren’t selling so well? Perhaps you’re submitting to an oversaturated category, like “flower.” Or, you aren’t choosing the best keywords for the job.

Enter picNiche.com, designed by Robert Davies and co., which is currently in beta and runs off the Fotolia API (with plans for more microstock agencies to be added later).

A rating less than ten is “bad” and over one hundred is “niche” (or very good).

Basically, you just head over to http://www.picniche.com/index.aspx and enter a keyword.

For instance, “Korea,” which spits out the following data:

Search Term: korea

TotalImages: 1393

TotalViewsIndexed: 12692

TotalDownloadsIndexed: 458

9.11 views per file (inferred).

0.33 downloads per file (inferred).

Our Rating: 3.00

Hmm, this seems to be a pretty oversubscribed keyword, but my Korea shots—such as the palace shot below--have actually done quite well for me on Shutterstock.

What about Houston?

Search Term: houston

TotalImages: 99

TotalViewsIndexed: 2975

TotalDownloadsIndexed: 112

30.05 views per file (inferred).

1.13 downloads per file (inferred).

Our Rating: 34.00

Certainly much better than “Korea.” Shots of Houston certainly have sold better for me on Shutterstock, but then again, that’s because of most of my shots are of Houston.

I’m looking forward to when Robert Davies adds all of the top-tier Microstock APIs to his keyword-rating engine.