How do we establish our niche?

I really want to get into the stock footage, and I have a few clips already, but they're not near to the potential that I could make. How do we find out about things like, what's high in demand? What do people need? How to make it good enough for people to actually want to buy? I'm definitely not looking to get rich, but I'd like to make something with stock footage...

I can't speak to the craft aspect because I'm not a visual artist. You can get a sense for what buyers are looking for by checking the Artist Reports pages under Artist Resources. One of the reports lists keywords in order of revenue. Then the trick is to figure out if one of the keywords matches your strengths (or deciding to develop strength in one of those areas). It also gives information on numbers of hits on the site for each keyword, which can give a clue that a particular niche is under- or pver-served.

Hope this helps,
B~)

Be careful, very careful looking at keyword results. It leads too many lazy Artist that put inappropriate keywords in resulting in Spam which scares buyers away. I really wish data on keywords were all eliminated and let Artists keyword on what is most appropriate to each clip and not use words that seem to result in more search results. That hurts all of us.

from an audio standpoint, i can say that probably sometimes i put in inaccurate tags, but not intentionally. its just that i cant always properly identify the moods so to put the exact tags. its harder than with images. in audio, specifically music, its pretty hard to put precisely the right tags, especially if your genres or moods differ (and if u also dont know much about music theory). i wish there was some software to automatically detect tags like with photos, but i dont see that coming in this century..