A lot of the images being uploaded to major websites these days have little relevance to what the market needs. I decided to do searches on
Shutterstock for country names to try to get some idea of the number of images from each location relative to what the likely demand is for such images.
Of course, many of the pictures taken by photographers in each of these countries don’t require a country name as a keyword including food shots and many generic people shots. Consequently, in no way are the figures an indication of all the images produced by photographers in any of these countries. Nevertheless, the data may have some relevance and provide some insights.
The first thing to notice is that there over 65 million of the 297 million Shutterstock images are listed as coming from one of the countries on my list. Only a little over 2 million of those have the keywords “United States” or “USA.” And yet, the U.S. market probably generates 30% of global stock photo revenue. If we include Canada and Mexico the total for North America is a little over 4 million images and yet over one-third of the total worldwide market is in North America.
The country most out of sync with demand is probably Thailand with over 7 million images with that keyword. I can’t imagine there is much relative demand for Thai images, no matter how great they are. About 41% of all the country identified images in the Shutterstock collection come from Asian countries and yet information from other sources indicate that no more than 12% to maybe 15% of global stock photo revenue comes from Asia. It appears that many photographers in these countries may be producing great images for which there is very little demand.
It is also interesting to compare the number of images from Western and Eastern Europe. Western Europe has about twice as many images as Eastern Europe, but I have to believe that these is a much higher demand for images from Western Europe (probably much more than 2 times the demand) that for those of Eastern Europe.
A very small percentages of the images come from South America and the Middle East – roughly 4% of the total from each area. This is probably reflective of the relative demand for each of these areas.
Currently about 22% of the images in the Shutterstock collection have a country listed as a keyword. Shutterstock is on track to have about 187 million downloads this year. If images with a country identifier are used as frequently as all other images in the collection (which I doubt), then there would be a little over 41 million uses of these 65 million images. Of course the few that are used get used many times so the vast majority of the images from most countries will never be used by anyone.
See the following list of images in the Shutterstock collection with each country search.
| United States & USA |
2,011,523 |
| Canada |
1,137,889 |
| Mexico |
912,288 |
| |
|
| |
4,061,700 |
| |
|
| Asia |
|
| Thailand |
7,166,556 |
| China |
6,017,768 |
| Japan |
3,805,040 |
| India |
2,393,024 |
| Korea |
1,341,246 |
| Indonesia |
1,313,125 |
| Malaysia |
1,242,377 |
| Australia |
1,156,420 |
| Vietnam |
791,948 |
| Taiwan |
438,725 |
| New Zealand |
437,261 |
| Singapore |
402,506 |
| Hong Kong |
398,192 |
| Cambodia |
297,631 |
| Philippines |
285,459 |
| Nepal |
274,036 |
| |
|
| |
27,761,314 |
| |
|
| Western Europe |
|
| Italy |
4,061,723 |
| Spain |
2,417,921 |
| France |
2,155,177 |
| Germany |
1,896,054 |
| UK |
1,633,885 |
| Greece |
1,287,173 |
| Portugal |
820,601 |
| Netherlands |
810,483 |
| Austria |
598,743 |
| Norway |
575,015 |
| Scotland |
468,229 |
| Ireland |
465,448 |
| Sweden |
417,855 |
| Finland |
326,902 |
| Belgium |
324,213 |
| Denmark |
218,570 |
| Malta |
137,261 |
| Luxembourg |
53,503 |
| |
|
| |
18,668,756 |
| |
|
| Eastern Europe & Russia |
|
| Russia |
3,267,249 |
| Ukraine |
1,438,488 |
| Poland |
904,063 |
| Croatia |
501,177 |
| Czech Republic |
494,266 |
| Romania |
435,954 |
| Hungary |
330,804 |
| Latvia |
315,107 |
| Belarus |
311,496 |
| Bulgaria |
301,685 |
| Slovakia |
248,845 |
| Serbia |
228,943 |
| Cyprus |
182,478 |
| Slovenia |
176,000 |
| Lithuania |
168,542 |
| Estonia |
131,283 |
| Moldova |
50,537 |
| |
|
| |
9,486,917 |
| |
|
| South America |
|
| Brazil |
898,931 |
| Peru |
383,581 |
| Chile |
298,026 |
| Argentina |
297,914 |
| Ecuador |
184,629 |
| Colombia |
167,254 |
| Bolivia |
129,025 |
| Venezuela |
76,236 |
| Uruguay |
58,025 |
| Paraguay |
40,689 |
| Guyana |
21,789 |
| Suriname |
21,777 |
| |
|
| |
2,577,876 |
| |
|
| Middle East |
|
| Israel |
562,086 |
| Egypt |
491,380 |
| Arab Emirates |
268,806 |
| Pakistan |
256,601 |
| Jordan |
198,649 |
| Iran |
158,508 |
| Saudi Arabia |
138,508 |
| Turkey country |
131,604 |
| Qatar |
97,062 |
| Palestine |
77,652 |
| Syria |
74,057 |
| Baharin |
72,919 |
| Ethiopia |
68,178 |
| Iraq |
62,843 |
| Lebanon |
59,805 |
| Afghanistan |
48,734 |
| Kuwait |
45,991 |
| Sudan |
44,810 |
| Yemen |
41,943 |
| Kurdistan |
8,755 |
| Lydia |
4,616 |
| |
|
| |
2,913,507 |
| |
|
| |
65,470,070 |
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