If photographers are serious about trying to earn a portion of their living from photography they should probably focus on producing video rather than still images. Or maybe when they organize a video shoot also shoot some still images of the same situations.
Recently, I was talking to Cameron Gough of
Envato in Australia. He pointed out that the majority of the company’s earnings come from graphic related content and only about 10% to 20% of downloads are of still stock images. He also noted that after graphic content video footage is the second highest type of content in demand without giving a percentage.
It should be noted that Envato is focused on supplying a full range of resources and educational information to graphic designers, including courses and tutorials, not more narrowly focused on just supplying visual content.
Nevertheless, considering the amount of content they have to offer in each category the numbers are very revealing. In all content categories they have 2,905,293 pieces of content. About 44% of the content (1,278,170) and still photos, but this content only represents 10% to 20% of the downloads.
On the other had the site only contains 77,688 graphic templates, 34,022 graphics, 38,703 presentation templates, 2,657 web templates and 1,099 CMS templates for a total of 154,169 graphic related things. Thus, less than 5% of the content available represents over 50% (the majority) of the downloads.
There are 992,339 video clips on the site representing 34% of the content. We don’t know what percent of the downloads this content represents, but it is the second most in demand subject matter after graphics and in more demand than still photos.
It is interesting that the professionals who purchase and use visual content for their projects have a greater need graphic created content than anything else. After that their next greatest need is for video and last of all for still images. Their needs are totally opposite from the amount of each category of content available.
It is worth noting that several years ago Shutterstock told us that about one-third of their downloads were of graphic content. They haven’t supplied any breakdown recently.
Searching the Shutterstock site we find that they have 214,325,298 still photos, 70,454,420 vector illustration, 41,632,831 non-vector illustrations and 18,945,688 video clips for a total of 346,129,069 pieces of content.
Twenty20
Envato also has a collection of about 60 million editorial (not cleared) and commercially cleared images called Twenty20. Envato Elements customers can access all of this collection under their subscription but need to go to the twenty20.com website to see them (there is single sign on to make this easy).
However, Envato discovered that not all customers liked going to a separate shopfront for Twenty20's photos so in recent months they have started moving the best of the Twenty20 images into the
elements.envato.com shopfront. Thus, once the editing is complete the much smaller Elements collection should be a premium collection of the best, most in demand images from the Twenty20.
The downside of video is that most videographers who do shoot both video and stills tell me that the production time requirements for video are much greater than that for stills.