One thing that has intrigued me about the microstock business is the role designers and illustrators play as content creators and how their participation on the seller side of the market influences imagery supply and demand. Shutterstock recently reported that in 2011 32% of the company’s total downloads were vector illustrations and that in the last 5 years customers have trended to move away from using photographs to illustrate certain concepts and toward the use of very graphic illustrations.
I decided to use
istockcharts to examine the 500 individuals with the most career downloads in order to learn a little more about who they are and the kind of work they do. It is important to note that istockcharts has data from 38,331 of iStock’s more than 100,000 contributors. These contributors represent more than 90% of iStock’s total downloads. On February 8, 2012 this group had a combined total of 116,519,790+ career downloads. The total images in their collections were 9,585,510..
The top 500 contributors (one-half of 1% of the total) have had 53,384,000 career downloads (46% of the total). Currently, these contributors have a combined total of 1,652,724 images with iStock which represent less than 18% of the total collection.
Graphic Design Professionals vs. Photographers
Istockcharts list the names of most contributors with links to their iStock portfolio. By examining the portfolio it is possible to determine whether the contributor is a photographer, designer, IT professional, Videographer or Other. 82 of the contributors in this top 500 do not allow their names to be used in istockcharts so our analysis is based primarily on 418 contributors.
| Number |
|
Career |
Average |
Total |
Average |
Image to |
| Contrib. |
|
Downloads |
Downloads |
Images |
Images |
DL Ratio |
| 73 |
Designers |
7,602,000 |
104,137 |
144,982 |
1986 |
52 |
| 37 |
Illustrators |
3,879,000 |
104,838 |
75,035 |
2027 |
52 |
| 4 |
IT |
231,000 |
57,750 |
8,724 |
2181 |
26 |
| 12 |
Other |
737,000 |
61,417 |
22,224 |
1852 |
33 |
| |
Non-Photog. |
|
|
|
|
|
| 126 |
Sub-total |
12,449,000 |
|
250,965 |
|
50 |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 289 |
Photographers |
31,746,000 |
109,848 |
1,102,532 |
3815 |
29 |
| 3 |
Videographers |
275,000 |
91,667 |
26,394 |
8798 |
10 |
| |
Photography |
|
|
|
|
|
| 292 |
Sub-Total |
32,021,000 |
|
1,128,926 |
|
28 |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 418 |
Sum of Above |
44,470,000 |
|
1,379,891 |
|
32 |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 82 |
No Information |
9,414,000 |
114,805 |
272,833 |
3327 |
34 |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 500 |
|
53,884,000 |
|
1,652,724 |
|
|
About 26% of the 418 list themselves as designers and illustrators. All the graphic arts contributions (including IT and Other) represent about 30% of all contributors.
It is difficult to determine the actual number of images that are photographs compared to illustrations because some graphic artists include a lot of photographs in their collections and many photographers use a lot of graphic design and image manipulation techniques in many of their photographs.
The average number of downloads per photographer is about the same as it is for designers and illustrators, but, on average, a photographer will have almost twice as many images in the collection as the designer of illustrator. Thus, designers and illustrators seem to get about twice the efficiency from their creations as is the case with photographers.
Photographers who hope to increase sales might want to pay more attention to the concepts that the graphic artists are illustrating and try to make their photographs more generic.
On the production side designers and illustrators have a number of advantages over photographers. Their production expenses are lower as they do not incur costs for models, props, locations or transportation. In general their equipment costs are also lower.
Graphic designers also have an advantage over photographers because they tend to work, at least some of the time, directly for the end using customer. As a result they often have a better sense of what customers actually want to use. This may be one of the reasons why their image-to-download-ratio (number of downloads per image in the collection) is so much higher than photographers.
Exclusives
One surprising result from this exercise was that the images of non-exclusive contributors are downloaded at about the same rate as those of exclusive contributors. About 25% of the 410 contributors were non-exclusive. (istockcharts follows a total of 5,808 exclusive contributors.) Non-exclusive contributors actually had a slightly higher download rate than those who are exclusive.
Of course, the images of exclusive contributors are selling for much higher fees and their royalty percentages are higher than those of non-exclusive contributors. Consequently, exclusive contributors should be earning significantly more from iStock than those who are non-exclusive. On the other hand, non-exclusive contributors will probably have the same images with many other distributors and may be earning a lot more in total revenue than those who are exclusive.
These statistics may be flawed because we’re dealing with “total career downloads.” The advantages of exclusivity have been greatly magnified in the last year or so as prices have been pushed up and exclusives have been given preference in the search return order. Using our current numbers as a base line we will take another look at sales in a few months and see if the comparative figures for a shorter period of time show some differences.
| Contributors |
|
Total Downloads |
Total Images |
DL per image |
| 304 |
Exclusive |
32,941,000 |
1,028,577 |
32 |
| 106 |
Non-Exclusive |
10,317,000 |
300,740 |
34 |
| 90 |
Un-Identified |
10,626,000 |
323,407 |
33 |
| |
|
|
|
|
| 500 |
Totals |
53,884,000 |
1,652,724 |
|
Rights managed and traditional royalty free photographers should also take note of the increased demand for simple, very graphic images. Customers are looking for images that will read well when used small and where the concept is impossible to miss. Those who can adjust their shooting in this direction will probably find that it pays off.