A Pragmatic Poll: Actual Numbers for Photo Websites

[Frank Petronio]

Everyone talks about stats, but what are the real numbers for visits (not "hits" or "pages") for smaller, private websites?

And any guesses as to what might be critical mass for different types of photo businesses?

For example: Would QT need 10 million visits per year to sell $100,000 worth of prints? How many visits equal X number of sales, guessing of course?

I know all this is guess work and the quality of the visits are much more important, but I can't find any data to work from here.

FWIW, my lowly photo website gets about 70K visits per month, on the rise but with an average of 690,000 visits over the past 12 months. (If I put more nudes on there I am sure I could get a rise, but that doesn't mean I'd get better quality visits LOL)

I don't try to sell prints so those sales are zero. I have gotten about $5K worth of paid assignments directly attributable to the website contacts in the past year (from people I would never have known of otherwise.) Plus I tied the website to some limited direct mail (postcards x 500 x six times per year) which generated more work but it is hard to determine how much the website influenced their buying decisions (I think it helped a lot though.) If I figure that the website played a 33% role, then it contributed about another $15K worth of business ($45K total from the campaign, all new business).

Obviously this shows that the website doesn't generate business in a vacuum and you multiply its effectiveness when you do an integrated marketing cycle (direct mail, ads, word of mouth, cold calls, forum participation, sheer fame and white teeth, etc.)

(The website has paid for itself many times over (about $1500 out of pocket) if you don't count the 100 plus hours spent generating content this year, which if I billed that at $100 per hour would be $10K.)(Of course I don't charge $100 per hour for internal work and I have a background in writing and designing, plus 18 prior versions of the website over ten years, so I would probably be more efficient at this than average and also get higher search engine rankings simply out of seniority.)

Understand what I am asking in a round about sort of way? Lots of complex factors and plenty of vagueness, but some "visits" numbers and informal comments about actually converting them into customers would be useful for all of us. Anyone else care to share?

thanks, FP

[QT Luong]

For sites with reasonable traffic, you can extrapolate visits using the "reach" number on alexa.com. 1 reach point equals to about 20,000 monthly visits. In 2005, the terragalleria.com site generated about twice the median family income for my place of residence. I do not conduct photo business other than licensing images and selling prints from the website.

Tuan.

[paulr]

especially for art sites, people visit for many reasons besides buying. i get a decent amount of traffic, but maybe only a few visits a year from someone who might be in the market for the kind of stuff i do.

maybe because there are only 3 or 4 such people out there ... i can't expect them to come back every day.

[Kirk Gittings]

This is a tough one to quantify Frank. You are getting a ton more visits than I am over the last 12 months (2k per month), but I am generating more revenue, but.............it is not that simple. The website is part of a huge broad campaign I set in motion a few years ago.

About 5 years ago I quit being shy about self-promotion.

Off the site (since Dec. when I launched it) I have gotten about 8k in assignment work, 4k in book sales and like 4 print sales and a few stock. However, very little of that (except the commercial work) I would call "pure" website sales in that it is not related to some other contact i.e. show, book or article pr in some other medium that sent them to the site where my site acts as just my portfolio and catalogue. Pure web site generated sales are few I think. It is all part of a concerted campaign of web, exhibits, articles and books about me, teaching, forum presence, the Freestyle Board etc. It is really hard to separate it out. I will say though that the website is worth its weight in gold in terms of legitimacy and visibility and that means allot to some people.

[robc]

I did a very small flash site for a friend starting a Garden Landscaping business as a side business to their main Commercial Landscaping business. The site only gets about 100 visits a day but it generates a lot of very valuable business. It was designed purely to attract garden designers looking for landscape contractors to do the build work. As it turns out they get many commisions direct from the public. Its paid for itself many times over. So, in this case at least, its quality and not quantity of visits that counts. The site is promoted by mailings to designers and from their main website.

p.s. tenuous link to photography - we used some Michael Kenna Images in the site. Maybe its the images which do the selling. Who knows.

[chris jordan]

Frank, all of the photographers who I have talked to or read about on this subject have unanimously said that selling prints on the internet is pretty much of a bust. Photography website make great portfolios for people to view, contact you about publication of images, etc., but as far as I know, there is no photographer who has any significant sales of prints going on directly from the internet. The exception is purchases by buyers who already know what they're getting-- they have seen the prints in a gallery, or already own a few, or stuff like that. But as far as a "critical mass" number of hits, I don't think there is such a thing. My website got something like 30 gigabytes of bandwidth last month, but virtually none of that traffic was about buying my prints (and the ones that were didn't write back when they found out the prices...!).

~cj

[Frank Petronio]

Right, that is obvious. I am just trying to get a handle on the metrics, which is something I haven't paid attention to before. I realize that >1% of the visitors are anything close to potential customers.

[Keith Laban]

Frank, I've often seen folk say that you'd be doing OK if you achieve one print sale for every 50,000 visits, but at this rate I wouldn't even bother to offer prints for sale.

I get the more prestigious image rights sales directly from my website but they are few and far between, the bread and butter boring stuff coming from agencies.

[chris jordan]

I think there are so many other variables that there is no way to reasonably correlate hits and sales. I heard there was a photographer who included "sex" in his list of metatags (or whatever they are called), and he got a million hits a day. His work sucked of course. Someone whose work is top quality might get one tenth of a percent of that, but those hits might lead to some form of business-- magazine publications or commercial assignments or whatever.

For me, the website is a place people can see my work and connect up with me. It's like having an instant portfolio anywhere in the world. That leads to all kinds of cool stuff, but not much in the way of direct purchases.

[QT Luong]

Chris is probably right as far as cutting edge photographic art is concerned, but my experience (and that of others as well) has shown that if you do more accessible work, you can sell on the internet... provided you have enough traffic.

If I was getting 30GB monthly traffic, I would not even sell a print each month. The number mentioned by Keith is one that I posted on photo.net, and it translates to sales that are not entirely insignificant for some sites.

Investing the time to create those large sites may not be worth it if you do not have products/services other than prints for sale.

[roteague]

Frank, all of the photographers who I have talked to or read about on this subject have unanimously said that selling prints on the internet is pretty much of a bust. Photography website make great portfolios for people to view, contact you about publication of images, etc., but as far as I know, there is no photographer who has any significant sales of prints going on directly from the internet.

I think that is probably pretty true. I average 1.5k hits per day on my website, but have made very few sales.

[Keith Laban]

...but my experience (and that of others as well) has shown that if you do more accessible work, you can sell on the internet...

Agreed, I wouldn't even consider trying to sell seriously expensive prints online, but small, open edition, accessible and relatively inexpensive prints can and do sell surprisingly well.

[robc]

Frank, what you haven't told us, to put your stats into some kind of context, is where your visits are coming from and on what search phrases. i.e. are those visits coming from the general public via google or are they coming from trackbacks and pings from your movabletype blog site which represents a very narrow but active demographic.

Why? because if they are coming from other bloggers then they may be useless in terms of print sales or they may not be. If they are mostly other photobloggers then probably useless. On the other hand, if they are from google then depending on the search phrases used then they could be useful.

So the question you ask is nowhere near explicit enough to make any sense of any answers unless the answers include all of the variables and since the variables are so variable your guess is as good as anyone elses.

[Frank Petronio]

Yeah, for once I agree with you Rob. I was really just wondering what kinds of numbers some of the photographer's sites were generating out of sheer curiousity. I was looking at some old client's brochureware sites that were only getting 50 visits a day and wondering why they ever invested so much $ into them ;)

My results are skewed cuz of the blogging and random stuff I get. If it were just rocks and trees and inkjets for sale I am sure it would be far less visits -- but probably better quality ones.

[robc]

the ;) tells us all we need to know...