Kathy Yeulet owns and operates
MonkeyBusinessImages, which she started in 2006 and is one of the most successful microstock production companies .
Previous to that she owned and operated Banana Stock, a company that produced and licensed stock images at traditional royalty free prices. With near perfect timing she sold that company in 2004 when the traditional royalty free prices were near their peak. Two years later decided to start producing images for the relatively new microstock market.
2006 was the year
Getty acquired iStockphoto and sales at that company began to take off. Cathy began putting images with iStock and by the end of 2011 had 4,604 images in the iStock collection. By the end of that year she has a combined total of over 360,000 career downloads from iStock. At the end of 2016 she had almost doubled the number of career downloads, and had a total of 48,391 images in her iStock collection.
Cathy has always supplied images to multiple microstock sites so it is impossible to make any estimates of the total career downloads she has from all collections. Around 2010 Shutterstock started taking significant market share from iStock. She now calls Shutterstock her “main client” despite the significant sales iStock is still making for her.
Currently Shutterstock has a global contributor community of over 225,000 photographers, illustrators, digital artists, and videographers. Only 177 have larger collections than MonkeyBusinessImages and many of those with larger collections are not as successful.
Cathy says that “literally every image” she uploads sells at least once “but of course some do a lot better than others. From a days shoot the top image may sell 6000 times.” It is unclear how many sell in the thousands and how many sell fewer than 10 times. If we look at iStock sales alone for 2016 she ended the year with 48,391 images in the collection and somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 total downloads for the year. Shutterstock sales may have been a lot better.
If you want to get an idea of the kind of stock images that are in demand it is very interesting to examine the MonkeyBusiness
portfolio on Shutterstock not only in terms of the quality of the imagery, but in the subject matter of the images she produces. The following is a list of the number of images that contain certain keywords. Nearly all of her work are images of people, and, of course, some of the images have multiples of these keywords.
| Keyword |
Number of |
Percent |
| |
Images |
of Total |
| people |
60,969 |
94.53% |
| children |
17,278 |
26.79% |
| hispanic |
10,558 |
16.37% |
| family |
10,280 |
15.94% |
| black |
9,975 |
15.47% |
| computer |
9,764 |
15.14% |
| business |
9,754 |
15.12% |
| senior |
9,351 |
14.50% |
| ethnic |
8,792 |
13.63% |
| food |
7,948 |
12.32% |
| asian |
6,778 |
10.51% |
| education |
5,126 |
7.95% |
| natural or nature |
3,482 |
5.40% |
| medical |
2,422 |
3.76% |
| baby |
2,391 |
3.71% |
| travel |
1,371 |
2.13% |
| animals |
373 |
0.58% |
| illustration |
354 |
0.55% |
| street scene |
177 |
0.27% |
| natural life |
87 |
0.13% |
| VR |
62 |
0.10% |
| nostalgia |
10 |
0.02% |
Take a look at the
Business Insider article and note the comments in the “What should you shoot?” section of the article. The keywords that in theory are often used include: natural, natural life, authentic, nostalgia, cybersecurity and VR.
If you do a search for these words in the Monkey Business collection you find that all the images with the keyword natural also have the keyword nature. There are 87 images with both the “natural” and “life” keywords. There are zero returns for “authentic” and “cybersecurity” and very few for VR and nostalgia. These are not subjects Cathy bothers to shoot. If you use the keyword “real” you get 935 real estate images, but I doubt that is what customers are looking for if they use the words real or real life.
When we look at what customers are buying – from MonkeyBusines at least – they don’t seem to be the same things many stock agencies keep telling us “customers are requesting.”
Recently Cathy told
Business Insider that her career earnings are “well into the millions.” Currently, she has “a team of about 10” working with her at MonkeyBusinessImage. A big part of those earnings must go to staff salaries, equipment and model fees. Currently, she has 64,500 images in the Shutterstock collection and 95% of them have people in them. She has model releases from all those people and I suspect not all of them agreed to work for free.