It is worth looking at recent
Shutterstock statistics. In the conference call yesterday Shutterstock said they had over 190,000 contributors at the end of 2016. In 2016 Shutterstock paid out about $138.400,000 to contributors. If we divide the total number of images in the collection (116,200,000) into contributor royalties on average contributors received $1.19 per-image in the collection for the full year.
In January
www.microstock.top identified 164,000 Shutterstock contributors, but only 14,373 had more than 999 images. These contributors supplied 77% (about 89,000,000) of all the images in the collection. Thus, on average these 14,373 had about 6,225 images each in the collection. However, one contributor, Rawpixel.com, had added over 550,000 images in 2016 and 28 others added more than 100,000 each. It should be noted that none of these contributors are individuals producing that many images. They are production companies with a significant number of image creators and support staff working together to produce this volume of imagery.
The remaining 91% (149,427) contributors who had fewer than 999 images in the collection had an approximate combined total of 27,200,000 images, or an average of about 182 images each. At $1.19 royalty per image this would mean that on average these contributors earned about $217.00 each during the year.
We must also remember that there is a cost to produce these images. Assuming that most of them were taken by someone snapping a picture with a cell photo during the process of their daily activities, there may not have been much cost. But even them the photographer had to go to the trouble of captioning and keywording the images and dealing with the hassle of uploading. If there were people in the picture the image creator had to also obtain a model release. If they owned a professional camera and spent any time planning their shoots, obviously there were additional costs.
Are Contributors Happy?
During the Shutterstock conference call yesterday one questioner asked, “Any quick thoughts on your royalty rate vs your competitors. Any changes there?
Steven Bern, the CFO and newly appointed Chief Operating Officer responded, “I think that what we’re trying to do is keep the best contributors on our platform and sustain their contribution of great, quality imagery, to drive our customers to continue to use Shutterstock. That has been a successful model. We see the royalty rate as fair, and our contributors deem it the same, so we look at it from the outcome of the interests of both our customers and contributors. We see what our competitors are doing but we don’t think cutting a single side of the marketplace is an effective mechanism for long term profitable, sustainable growth.”
And as of December 31, 2016 Shutterstock had $224,190,000 in cash and cash equivalents. They obviously feel it is necessary to hold onto all that cash for future possible needs. Sharing some of it with the image producers doesn't seem to be in the cards.