Subscription

Shutterstock Q3 2020 Financial Results

By Jim Pickerell | 990 Words | Posted 10/27/2020 | Comments
Shutterstock has reported Q3 2020 revenue of $165.2 million up 4% compared to $159.1 million in Q2 2019 and down from $159.2 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download was $3.79 per-image compared to $3.40 in Q3 2019 and $3.61 the previous quarter. Total image and video downloads for Q3 were 43.4 million compared to 46.3 million a year earlier and down from 44 million from the previous quarter. At the end of the quarter Shutterstock had over 350 million images and 20 million video clips in its collection, for a total of 370 million pieces of content.

Stock Photography: Is Volume The Answer?

By Jim Pickerell | 1402 Words | Posted 7/29/2020 | Comments
I can remember when I was primarily an assignment photographer and occasionally sold outtakes from assignments on the side. Most of the income I needed to support my family came from assignments. Stock sales gave us a little extra. Demand for stock started to grow and it became harder for me to get assignments as I was working in an area where the competition was stiff from a lot of top quality experienced photographers. Buyers wanted to pay a little less than it cost to do an assignment. They liked having instant access to the stock image they needed and not having to spend a lot of their time organizing assignment shoots.

Shutterstock Partners With Microsoft: Gives Advertisers Free Images

By Jim Pickerell | 252 Words | Posted 7/24/2020 | Comments
Shutterstock has entered into a partnership with Microsoft to give brands access to the stock photography company’s library of images for use in ads. The API integration with Microsoft Advertising will give advertisers on the Microsoft Audience Network FREE ACCESS to millions of commercially licensed images.

Storyblocks To Close Marketplace

By Jim Pickerell | 198 Words | Posted 8/13/2019 | Comments
Storyblocks will be closing the Marketplace segment of its business on September 10th and moving back to a subscription only offering. Contributors who have outstanding payouts will receive those payments sometime after September 10th even if the amount owed has not met the minimum payout requirement.

Shutterstock Enterprise

By Jim Pickerell | 891 Words | Posted 7/3/2019 | Comments
One of the big questions about Enterprise sales at Shutterstock is “Why do big customers want an Enterprise deal?” On average Enterprise customers are paying more per quarter than E-commerce customers. What additional services do they get? In 2018 Enterprise customers generated about 40.9% of Shutterstock’s total revenue, or about $254.8 million. The average Enterprise customer pays Shutterstock $6,370 per year, but they could be getting 750 images per month for $2,388 a year. Maybe they are using a lot of video at $63.16 per clip, but there must be other benefits justifying the paying of the much higher fees.

Shutterstock Editor Surpasses 5 Million Users

By Jim Pickerell | 506 Words | Posted 6/3/2019 | Comments
Shutterstock, has announced that its free design application, Shutterstock Editor, has surpassed more than 5 million users. The tool helps users, including creatives, designers, and marketers, to speed up their design workflow with easy-to-use, powerful editing functionality and customizable templates.

Image Creators Need Better Sales Information

By Jim Pickerell | 865 Words | Posted 2/27/2019 | Comments
Image creators need better information about the kind of content that is selling. Are customers looking at higher priced content? Can creators earn more money if their images are in a collection like Offset where images are licensed for much higher prices? Should creators produce more stills? Should they buy new equipment and start shooting video that sells for higher prices? Shutterstock’s quarterly reports to investors aren’t very helpful in this regard.

Revenue Per DL vs Revenue Per Image Created

By Jim Pickerell | 981 Words | Posted 11/5/2018 | Comments
In their reports to investors Shutterstock has always emphasized their steadily growing Revenue Per Download as well as their growth in the number of images offered to customers. But there is another figure that is extremely important to image creators. That is the Revenue Per Image In The Collection (RPIIC). That has been steadily declining since Q2 2014.

Subscriptions Or Individual Licenses

By Jim Pickerell | 844 Words | Posted 10/10/2018 | Comments
Over the weekend on Stockphoto@yahoogroups.com Rick Boden said, “I was getting serious about (putting my images with) Adobe Stock Images and then I realized they sell images via subscription. I have a very bad feeling about getting into an arrangement like that based on experience where my present agency (that) has a tie in with Getty where I am getting many royalties of less than a dollar because of subscription sales.”

Shutterstock Update: Creator Earnings?

By Jim Pickerell | 633 Words | Posted 8/20/2018 | Comments
At the end of 2017 Shutterstock had about 300,000 “active contributors.” In the press release put out on August 1, 2018 they said, “Since the launch of Shutterstock, more than 450,000 photographers, artists and designers have become contributors to our platform.” Since it is hard to believe that they added 150,000 new contributors in just six months, I suspect they make a distinction between “active contributors” and “all people who have ever contributed” in their 15-year history. We asked their PR department, but got no clarification.

What’s In Demand At Shutterstock

By Jim Pickerell | 1425 Words | Posted 7/16/2018 | Comments
I’ve examined the number of images in certain keyword categories at Getty and iStock. Today, I’ve done a count of the number of Shutterstock images with the same keywords as the other two agencies to see if it is possible to draw any comparisons. I'll take a look at the comparisons of collection size between Getty and Shutterstock. In addition there are some interesting things to be learned when comparing the number of photos with the number of illustrations on the Shutterstock site.

Shutterstock Launches Ireland Office

By Jim Pickerell | 555 Words | Posted 6/12/2018 | Comments
Shutterstock has announced the launch of its Dublin office with the intent to initially hire 40 professionals including engineering roles, and to potentially grow the team further over the coming years. This project is supported by the Irish Government through IDA Ireland.

IBM Watson To Improve Shutterstock Search

By Jim Pickerell | 301 Words | Posted 5/18/2018 | Comments
Shutterstock is enlisting the help of IBM’s Watson AI technology to make it easier for marketers to find images, videos, and music tracks. The company announced today that its library of more than 200 million assets will become available in July through the Watson Content Hub, a cloud-based management system designed to aid in the creation of websites, apps, billboards, and more.

Shutterstock Q1 2018 Financial Results

By Jim Pickerell | 1009 Words | Posted 4/26/2018 | Comments
Shutterstock has reported Q1 2018 revenue of $153 million up $22.8 million compared to $130.2 million in Q1 2017. On a constant currency basis revenue grew about 12.8% compared to the first quarter of 2017. The revenue was also up $1.8 million from Q4 2017. Revenue per download averaged $3.40 per image, an 16.8% increase over Q1 2017.

Shutterstock Expands Leadership Team

By Jim Pickerell | 493 Words | Posted 3/13/2018 | Comments
Shutterstock, has announced the expansion of its leadership team with three hires over the last six months. David Petts as Chief Revenue Officer, Lou Weiss joins the company as Chief Marketing Officer and Lisa Nadler, who joined the company in 2017, as Chief Human Resources Officer.

Shutterstock’s Average Price Increases: What Do They Mean?

By Jim Pickerell | 946 Words | Posted 2/23/2018 | Comments
The numbers Shutterstock put out yesterday got me thinking. Is it really possible for the average price per download to steadily rise in a year when they have introduced new 10 and 50 image packs at lower costs to the customers?  Do the download figures really mean the customers are using more of every category of imagery?

Shutterstock 2017 Financial Results

By Jim Pickerell | 1072 Words | Posted 2/22/2018 | Comments
Shutterstock has reported Q4 2017 revenue of $151.8 million up $21.7 million, or 16.6% on a constant currency basis, compared to $130.2 million in Q4 2016. The revenue was also up $10.7& million from Q3 2017. Revenue per download averaged $3.33 per image, an 11% increase over Q4 2016. About 27% of revenue, or roughly $150.4 million, was paid out in royalties to contributors.

Shutterstock Invests In ZCool, Sells Webdam

By Jim Pickerell | 357 Words | Posted 2/22/2018 | Comments
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that on January 4, 2018, the Company invested $15.0 million in convertible preferred shares issued by Zcool Network Technology Limited ("Zcoolto”). Zcool's primary business is the operation of an e-commerce platform in China whereby customers can pay to license content contributed by creative professionals. The platform has nearly six million registered users. Zcool has been the exclusive distributor of Shutterstock creative content in China since 2014.

More Than 1 Billion Images Licensed By Shutterstock

By Jim Pickerell | 298 Words | Posted 1/31/2018 | Comments
Shutterstock has announced that in its 14-year history it has licensed more than 1 billion royalty free images, videos and music tracks across all of its businesses. Currently the company has more than 170 million commercial images, 40 million editorial images and 9 million video clips in its collections.

Shutterstock Forecasts 2018 Creative Trends

By Jim Pickerell | 770 Words | Posted 1/17/2018 | Comments
Shutterstock has released its 2018 Creative Trends Report. Every year, Shutterstock customers across the world make billions of searches for images, footage, and music. Shutterstock creative teams analyze this search and download data to discover the biggest year-over-year increases and identify the trends they believe will continue to grow throughout 2018.

Can Your IP Address Affect Your Shutterstock Sales

By Jim Pickerell | 307 Words | Posted 1/17/2018 | Comments
One Shutterstock photographer who has resided in various countries at different times reports that the Shutterstock search engine seems to use the contributor’s IP address as part of the algorithm to rank images higher or lower in the search return order based on location.

Two Categories Of Image Suppliers

By Jim Pickerell | 1019 Words | Posted 1/8/2018 | Comments
Broadly, there are two different categories of photographer who produce stock images. I believe way less than 7% of Shutterstock contributors are earning enough annually to view stock photography as a career. A contributor probably needs a collection of at least 20,000 images to earn a reasonable amount of money by U.S. standards. At least 93% of Shutterstock contributors have fewer than 1,000 images in the collection and their average income is less than $200 annually. See the breakdowns.

Leading Shutterstock Contributors

By Jim Pickerell | 1244 Words | Posted 1/5/2018 | Comments
At the end of 2016 Shutterstock had 190,000 contributors. By May 2017 that number was up to 225,000 and in September when they launched Shutterstock Custom Content they said they had 250,000 contributors. Presumably the number was even higher at the end of the year.

Shutterstock Showcases Premier Editorial Content To All Customers

By Jim Pickerell | 894 Words | Posted 12/20/2017 | Comments
Last week Shutterstock notified its editorial shooters that they had begun showcasing all of their Premier Editorial content on Shutterstock.com. Previously this content has only been accessible through the Shutterstock Premier website. “The new editorial tab will include our historic Rex collection, images from strategic partners, including AP, BFA, epa, and live coverage of breaking news, entertainment and sports events,” they said. 

Shutterstock Bans Images Of Ape And Monkey “Actors”

By Jim Pickerell | 351 Words | Posted 12/18/2017 | Comments
After PETA (People For Ethical Treatment Of Animals) pointed out that monkeys and great apes suffer immensely when used for photo shoots—and that images of these animals in unnatural settings can harm conservation efforts and bolster the illegal wildlife trade—Shutterstock agreed to remove and ban all such photographs and videos of these species from its collection as well as from those of its subsidiary Bigstock.