From pixels to profit: What our top-seller dashboard revealed in just 7 days
Spoiler: A single design tweak accounted for more than half of last week's best-selling illustrations.
A quick back-story
Between 16–22 June 2025 I scraped Adobe Stock’s “Top Sellers — Illustrations” feed and poured the results into a spreadsheet. The snapshot captured 120 individual items that collectively moved thousands of licenses in a single week. The file holds:
- Title
- Full keyword string
- Top-level category
- Thumbnail URL
- Flags for transparent background and AI-generated (GenTech)
All raw rows live in the downloadable sheet — linking out via Gumroad so you can slice it any way you like.
What exactly did we analyse?
- Market window: 7-day rolling top-seller chart (Illustrations only).
- Granularity: One row per unique asset ID (no duplicates).
- Signals pulled: Primary category, transparency flag, AI flag, keyword list (≈ 5–25 tokens each).
- Volume: 120 rows × 7 columns → 840 data points.
High-level numbers at a glance
Top 10 categories
| Category | Count | Percentage |
|----------------------|-------|------------|
| Graphic Resources | 68 | 56.7% |
| Technology | 17 | 14.2% |
| Culture and Religion | 12 | 10.0% |
| Business | 8 | 6.7% |
| States of Mind | 3 | 2.5% |
| Industry | 2 | 1.7% |
| People | 2 | 1.7% |
| Lifestyle | 1 | 0.8% |
| Hobbies and Leisure | 1 | 0.8% |
| Animals | 1 | 0.8% |AI vs human artwork
| AIGenerated | Count | Percentage |
|-------------|-------|------------|
| False | 96 | 80.0% |
| True | 24 | 20.0% |Transparency matters
| Transparent | Count | Percentage |
|-------------|-------|------------|
| True | 82 | 68.3% |
| False | 38 | 31.7% |Four insights that jump off the dashboard
Category concentration
More than half of all revenue-winners fell under Graphic Resources — think icon packs and 3-D emoji sets designers can drop straight into UIs. If you’re debating niche vs. evergreen, stock buyers are still hungry for utility art that speeds their workflow.
The PNG premium
A transparent background was present in ↗ 68 % of charting assets. That convenience layer — no white box to erase — carries real monetary weight. When exporting, deliver a clean alpha PNG alongside your JPEG preview.
Humans still rule (for now)
Only 20 % of top sellers were flagged GenTech = True. Buyers continue to trust human-crafted nuance, or at least aren’t penalising hand-made work. If you do employ AI, lean into post-editing so the result feels purpose-built, not prompt-dumped.
Keyword hotspots
Across 3,000+ individual tags, the 15 most frequent terms were:
illustration, icon, symbol, design, signs, background, three-dimensional, vector, isolated, transparent, shape, business, texture, light, modern
Notice how functional descriptors (icon, vector, isolated) outweigh style buzzwords. Clear metadata still drives search visibility.
What this means for illustrators & brand owners
- Bundle utility first. Icon sets, UI elements and visual “lego bricks” dominate sales velocity; storytellers can add flair but keep usability front-and-center.
- Ship transparency. Buyers pay for plug-and-play; spend the extra minute to export a background-free PNG.
- Polish your prompts. AI can be a boost, but unchecked noise rarely lands on the bestseller list. Curate, refine, and humanise.
- Tag like it’s 1999. The algorithm is literal — use plain nouns and functions before artistic metaphors.
Grab the full spreadsheet
Curious which exact files made
the cut? Want to pivot by keyword or build your own charts?
[Download
the detailed sheet on Gumroad] and unlock every row,
formula-ready.
Wrapping up
A week’s worth of sales data won’t predict the entire market, but it spotlights durable buying patterns: utility assets, transparent formats, and search-friendly keywords remain the highway to royalty income. Whether you sketch vectors from scratch or nudge pixels with AI, focus on saving the customer’s time and you’ll save a place on next week’s leaderboard.