It's already been a crazy January with the Wuhan Virus topic drowning sales on microstock related to Chinese New Year but February seems to even top January in that matter.
remotevfx was among the first 7 professional stock suppliers jumping on the train of the so-called Wuhan virus or coronavirus. Among other things we saw a drastic swing between the hottest trends in keywords first starting with "Wuhan Virus", then "Coronavirus" and eventually going for "2019-nCoV" by end of January. Now we see another trend picking up with the new official name given by the WHO but -as in most cases like this- the word of mouth was faster than officials (remember the swine flu).
Apart from any ethical thoughts, we see the classic user behaviors in SEA and the Middle East highly demanding drastic versions with biohazard signs and skulls while European and American publishers tend to choose a more settled design without these archaic elements. With the death toll constantly rising and the usual decrease in public awareness, news coverage now focuses on the huge economic impact that eventually could climax in a worldwide recession. So for the end of February and the first half of March, expect to see a massive saturation of a new triangle: Collages of Chinese symbols with economic and viral image elements.
As per our sales, we see that nifty designs sell differently than plain graphics. The numbers are quite high on both options but the client base is quite a different one.
We released a test in late January and can now see that both designs made an even 200+ sales in the first week:
We decided to run a test with one motif that just differs in some minor design aspects. One version is a more decent flag-like design. Some might say it's the more elaborate one. The second design was a plain news graphic-like background/topic teaser image.
Both images performed exceptionally fast with sales around 2 hours after acceptance on the usual microstock sites. As mentioned before - different styles appeal to different clients. The flag was used for quite some YouTube news coverage while the plain graphics could be found in many business and finance publications (electronic and print).
And we know - many of you are here for the magic 49 keywords:
chinese, flag, recession, 2019-ncov, economy, coronavirus, biohazard, business, trade, disease, wuhan virus, fall, statistics, crash, currency, money, sell, investment, trend, digital, graph, red, china, stock, market, crisis, illustration, abstract, chart, arrow, background, financial, symbol, finance, down, design, diagram, stock market, decreasing, shares, exchange, rate, no people, industry, wealth, gdp, gross domestic product, index, doldrums
Good luck everyone and good sales!