Getty has just sent out an email to its customers promoting its Creative Royalty-Free Imagery. When you click on
View All Creative Images you find that there are 16,844,390 images in the Creative RF collection. There are also 6,590,271 "Creative RM" images in the total Creative Collection.
Then they go on to say that they have over 240,000 contributors worldwide and are adding over 9 million images and videos per quarter.
I’m pretty sure that 240,000 and 9 million refer to Getty’s total collection including not only RF, but Creative RM, iStock, Editorial and Footage.
If they are really just talking about Creative RF that would mean that on average each contributor has only 70 images in the collection, and that they double the size of the collection every 6 months.
We
reported earlier that Getty total income for the 12 months ending September 2017 was $836.8 million. Assuming that 240,000 refers to the contributors to all collections, then the average contributor generates $3,486.66 in revenue for Getty annually. If the images supplied by the contributor are RF, and he/she receives a 20% royalty, then the “AVERAGE” contributors would earn about
$697.33 per-year.
Of course, we know that a significant percent of the Creative RF images (maybe as much at 50%) are supplied to Getty by other stock agencies. Thus, there is an additional cut, before the image creators of these images will receive their royalty share. On average these creators will receive a lot less than $697 annually.