For a long time, I’ve been trying to get some idea of the revenue AdobeStock generates annually. Adobe doesn’t share that information, but I’ve finally arrived at a strategy that may help.
I’ve contacted a few of Adobe’s major contributors and asked them what their total royalty earnings were from Adobe in the last year and the total number of images they have in the collection.
Adobe is paying these contributors
33% of the total revenue it receives from the customer. So I started by multiplying the gross annual royalties the photographers reported by 3 to get a gross revenue figure.
Then I divided the total number of images in the collection into the gross revenue figure to determine the average annual revenue per image for these photographers.
For example, the combined annual revenue was $15,237 and the total images these photographers had in the collection was 15,480) Thus, the average gross annual revenue Adobe receives per image in its collection is $0.9843. A 33% royalty share of that would mean each photographer receives about $0.3248 annually per image in the collection .
Adobe currently has 160,868,849 pieces of content in its collection. You can determine this figure by going to (
https://stock.adobe.com/ ), adjust the search to “All” and click in the search box without entering any search terms. In the upper left hand corner Adobe will show a count of the search results. Multiply that number by $0.9843 and we get a
gross annual revenue ballpark figure of $158,343,298.
This figure won’t be totally accurate. The average per-image-in-the-collection would depend on the number of images the photographers had any given time. But it should give a reasonable ballpark figure if the photographers sampled represent the average.
It is also interesting to note the breakdown of types of imagery in the collection:
| All |
160,868,849 |
|
| Images |
147,328,600 |
|
| Videos |
12,397,571 |
|
| Templates |
27,481 |
|
| 3D |
10,886 |
|
| Premium |
1,104,985 |
|
| Editorial |
11,481,775 |
(included in the image count) |
I also suspect that Adobe’s actual gross revenue is higher than this number and may be around $200 million. Thus, the photographer in my representative sample, may not represent the average. If gross revenue is $200 million that would indicate that some photographers with high demand subject matter might be earning as much as $0.40 per image in the collection or even a little higher annually.
Those interested in seeing how their annual earnings per image in the collection compare with those of other major contributors can use the above strategy to get a comparative number.
Suppose from each 1-day shoot you get 100 good images that are accepted into the collection. That would mean that you would be earning $32.48 per day (or $4.06 per hour). And if you could could produce the same volume of material daily for 2,000 working days per year you would earn $64,960 per year. However, it is very unlikely that anyone would be that productive over a long term and will have zero costs of production.