Looking at the Camera More Engaging to Stock Buyers?

David Gilder    Design and Development, Photography     Advertising, Copy, design, Microstock, Models, Photography, Sales Trends, Stock Photography, Text

Rahul Pathak over at LookStat (a multi-stock agency statistical analysis webtool) has put together some information about whether or not it is more engaging to have the models looking at the camera, or looking away. He looked at sales trends between images of senior citizens, comparing images where the models were looking at the camera to those where the models were looking at each other or off into the distance. His results were very surprising.

Previous studies have shown that people looking at ads will follow the direction the person in the ad is looking. Ad designers often take advantage of this to direct attention to the text of an ad. Rahul’s expectation was that designers would be purchasing images where the models look away in order to take advantage of this natural human tendency to follow the line of sight to the text placement. However, it appears that designers are more likely to select images where the models are looking directly at the camera.

Rahul suggests that this is due to these images being more engaging to the designers in the search results. There appears to be an almost two-to-one bias in favor of models looking at the camera, and it’s possible the more engaging search thumbnails are attracting additional attention to those images. Content producers (stock photographers) should take this into consideration when posing and framing their images; it might just bring in some additional sales.

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