Time for next step in the microstock photography startup checklist:

The perfect market is a market with:

• Lot’s of hungry buyers
• Limited competition
• Something you’re passionate about

You should know what you’re passionate about but how do you find markets with hungry buyers and limited competition?

Easy, you spy on your competitors and photo buyers. It’s a bit sneaky but it’s perfectly legal and it’s a brilliant method.

Just go to iStockphoto.com or any other microstock agency and they will disclose this information for you if you know where to look at it.

Think about it for a while. The number of downloads is the same as demand. Many downloads of an image means lot’s of hungry buyers right?

And the number of images in a certain market is the same as competition, right? Many images means lot’s of fierce competition.

Here’s a screenshot from the worlds largest microstock agency where I’ve marked how you can easily find markets with lazy competition and lot’s of thirsty (even hungry and desperate) buyers by using readily available information.

See how incredibly easy it is to spy on your competition and photo buyers?

Let’s take this screenshot from iStockphoto below as a practical example on how to calculate a good market.

All you have to do to find a market with hungry buyers and limited competition is to divide the number of downloads with the number of images for a certain market. The higher ratio you get the better market.

In this example we have 400 downloads / 980 images for the market trout fishing which gives us a ratio of 0.408. To make sure trout fishing have enough depth you can take the average downloads of the first 10 images and divide with the number of images.

Just make sure you use the same method for all markets/keywords when you compare them

Your first strategic decision is now to decide which market/niche to enter.

Later you’ll expand to more markets to enter to really explode your sales but I’ll come back to that at a later post.

Previous posts in this series:

1. Microstock Photography Tutorial
2. Types of stock photography
3. STEP #1: Research hot selling markets
4. STEP #2: Leverage on your strength
5. STEP #3: Research for lame and lazy competition