Shutterstock Stats

Posted on 2/8/2017 by Jim Pickerell | Printable Version | Comments (1)

As of January 19, 2017 Shutterstock had 119,292,457 royalty free stock images in its collection according to www.microstock.top. They had added 1,352,852 new stock images during the week.

If you go to the Shutterstock site, it says they have “Over 100 million royalty-free stock images/over 800,000 new stock images added weekly.” Shutterstock used to regularly supply and update of the number of stock images on its site, but once they hit 100 million it seems they have decided not to bother updating further.

I recently discovered www.microstock.top which provides some very detailed breakdowns of Shutterstock contributors. It is unclear how frequently they will update this information, but it is the kind of information that can help everyone in the industry – Shutterstock contributor or not – have a better understanding of Shutterstock’s business.



Microstock.top has used archive.org/web/ to search thousands of creator portfolio pages at www.shutterstock.com.  This is not hacking, fishing, use of an API or insider information. These are pages that are accessible to everyone. There used to a website called http://istockcharts.multimedia.de/ that provided daily updates of similar information about iStock contributors. They stopped providing that service in the spring of 2012. We hope microstock.top will continue to update the information they have supplied on a regular basis.

Photographers, Illustrator/Vector Artists


According to microstock.top at the end of 2016 Shutterstock had 1,679,000 registered contributors, but only 164,900 had more than 0 images. Evidently a lot of people sign up, but never submit any images, or couldn’t get any images accepted.



Of the 164,900 only 14,373 (8.71%) had more than 999 images in their portfolios. The total images of the 14,373 were 91,700,000 or 77.06% of all the images in the Shutterstock library as of January 19, 2017.

Of this 14,373 with more than 999 images in the collection there were 3,671 (26%) where their home countries were not identified. The other 74% break down as follows:



Countries/Regions Contributors
U.S. Canada, Mexico 856
Russian Federation & Ukraine 2964
Eastern Europe & Former Soviet 441
Germany, Poland, Italy, UK, Spain 1476
Rest of European Union 1405
Asia, Australia, New Zealand 2568
South & Central America 98
Africa (46 in South Africa) 65

In addition, there were another 829 contributors that don’t fit neatly into any of these groupings. It is interesting to note the number of contributors who live and work in the Russian Federation and Eastern Europe. In addition, there are three times as many contributors in Asia as there are in North America.  

The top 10 countries with the most images in Shutterstock are:

Country Images In
  Collection
Ukraine 9,920,419
Russian Federation 8,314,965
Thailand 7,960,642
United States 4,377,154
Poland 2,408,190
United Kingdom 2,086,978
Germany 1,862,617
Romania 1,857,136
Spain 1,602,637
Belarus 1,472,245
   
Total 41,862,983

There were also 27,731 videographers with more than 0 video clips

Country Clips Videographers Average
      Clips Per
      Videographer
Russian Federation 681,847 2444 279
United States 660,560 1973 335
Ukraine 471,822 1555 303
Thailand 265,449 3261 81
United Kingdom 241,411 688 351
Canada 149,019 364 409
Italy 144,355 673 214
Germany 141,016 698 202
Poland 137,969 342 403
Romania 92,459 295 313


Copyright © 2017 Jim Pickerell. The above article may not be copied, reproduced, excerpted or distributed in any manner without written permission from the author. All requests should be submitted to Selling Stock at 10319 Westlake Drive, Suite 162, Bethesda, MD 20817, phone 301-461-7627, e-mail: wvz@fpcubgbf.pbz

Jim Pickerell is founder of www.selling-stock.com, an online newsletter that publishes daily. He is also available for personal telephone consultations on pricing and other matters related to stock photography. He occasionally acts as an expert witness on matters related to stock photography. For his current curriculum vitae go to: http://www.jimpickerell.com/Curriculum-Vitae.aspx.  

Comments

  • Jim Pickerell Posted Feb 10, 2017
    Some readers have questioned why a relatively small country like Thailand has such a high proportion of the images in the Shutterstock collection. There ate 1823 contributors with a total of 7,960,642 images or an average of 4,367 images per contributor.

    One Thai resident suggested that King, Rama IX who passed away last year was an avid hobbyist photographer. He was highly regarded and looked up to by everyone in the country regardless of social status, political views, etc. Maybe his interests in photography encouraged many of his subjects to also take up the hobby.

    In any event, if you do a search on Shutterstock for Thailand you get 2,460,087 results. Search for Vietnam and you get 253,037 results; Malaysia, 297,560 results; Singapore, 124,794 results and for China only 1,219,945 results. Something is causing people to take a lot more pictures of Thailand than other Southeast Asian nations and I don’t think it is because customer demand is greater for Thai images than those of China.

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