Back in February 2016
microstock.top began using archive.org/web/ to search thousands of creator portfolio pages at
www.shutterstock.com and record the data. This is not hacking, fishing, use of an API or insider information. These pages are accessible to everyone.
Shutterstock has reported Q4 2016 revenue of $130.2 million and a total of $494.3 million in revenue for all of 2016. The full year revenue was up about 16% from $425.1 million in 2015. There were a total of 167.9 million downloads for the year up from 147.2 million in 2015. While revenue grew 16% the collection size grew 63% to 116.2 million up from 71.4 million at the end of 2015.
An editorial photographer in London pointed out to me today that he has to notify Shutterstock when his pictures are used in order to get paid. Evidently Shutterstock doesn’t know that it is standard practice of many publications in the UK
not to notify the agency when they use an image. Instead, they wait for the agency or the photographer to call them or send them an invoice.
ImagineChina (IC), a leading photo and video agency on the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, has signed a three-year exclusive agreement with the Chinese Super League (CSL), the country's most prestigious football league.
Back in November iStock contributors were told that “Due to the complexity of the work required (in the iStock Royalties and Unification Project) we are pushing back most of the changes by about a month.” Given the new system for calculating subscription royalties that was being introduced, January statement would
not be available until February 20th and royalties would be paid on February 25th. February 20th has passed. Still no statements.
A top 2017 priority for the major image distributors should be to reverse existing pricing trends and find a way to begin to increase usage fees to some extent. Usage fees have been steadily declining for a number of years. The industry must find a way to turn the corner.
Is there a future for editorial photographers in France? France used to be one of the most vibrant markets in the world for editorial photography. That seems to be rapidly dying, not because of a lack of French publications (See
chart) that want to use editorial pictures. Some just don’t want to pay for the images they use.
I was recently asked if I had any statistics on the number of unique RM/RF images available for commercial licensing. Last September Justin Brinson said he had more than 500,000,000 unique RM and traditional RF images (no microstock) on his
PicturEngine platform. These images were provided by 64 different agencies and a number of individual photographers.
One things that surprised me about the research I did for the
Alamy Measures article was the small number of sales that were recorded.
I Made A Mistake. In last week’s story on
Alamy Image Manager I said that “contributors have no idea how frequently customers use a particular word to search for images.” That turns out to be totally wrong.