Financial Results

How Oringer Could Improve Creator Compensation

By Jim Pickerell | 506 Words | Posted 12/16/2020 | Comments
If Jon Oringer of Shutterstock donated his annual salary of $4,598,580 to image creators who produce the products Shutterstock licenses, and divided it among creators based on the number of images licensed, how would that benefit image creators?

Don’t Reveal Your Shutterstock Earnings To Anyone

By Jim Pickerell | 559 Words | Posted 12/7/2020 | Comments
Shutterstock doesn’t want their contributors revealing how much – or how little – they earn. Presumably, this is because they believe that if contributors knew how little they might receive for the imagery they submit they wouldn’t bother to submit anything.

Shutterstock Public Offering

By Jim Pickerell | 351 Words | Posted 8/14/2020 | Comments
On Wednesday Shutterstock announced a public offering of 2,580,000 shares of its common stock at a price to the public of $48.50 per share. Of this total 2,064,000 of the shares are owned by Jon Oringer (Shutterstock's Founder, Executive Chairman of the Board. The other 516,000 shares are owned by the company. Mr. Oringer will net $100,104,000 from the sale of his shares and the company will earn $25,026,000 from its sale of 516,000 shares bringing the total for the public offering to $125,130,000.

Shutterstock Q2 2020 Financial Results

By Jim Pickerell | 1453 Words | Posted 7/28/2020 | Comments
Shutterstock has reported Q2 2020 revenue of $159.2 million down 2% compared to $161.7 million in Q2 2019 and down from $161.3 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download was $3.61 per-image compared to $3.44 in Q2 2019 and $3.42 the previous quarter. Total image and video downloads for Q2 were 44 million compared to 46.6 million a year earlier and down from 46.8 million from the previous quarter. At the end of the quarter Shutterstock had over 340 million images and 19 million video clips in its collection,

What’s Fair Compensation?

By Jim Pickerell | 203 Words | Posted 7/24/2020 | Comments
Shutterstock’s gross revenue in 2019 was $648,500,000. Total royalties paid out to all contributors in 2019 was about $181,730,000. Total Shutterstock stock owned by Jon Oringer is worth over $650,000,000.

Government Aid For The Self-Employed

By Jim Pickerell | 432 Words | Posted 6/4/2020 | Comments
Self-employed, freelance photographers are being hit especially hard by the covid 19 pandemic. Most normally work from one short-term job to the next. They tend to be paid by the job, or the project, not a salary. Often these jobs last only a day, or less in terms of hours spent. When everyone is sheltering in place and much of the country closed down it is impossible for many photographers to find any work at all. The CARES and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) programs have focused on helping salaried employees, not those who are self-employed.

Global Stock Photography Growth Potential

By Jim Pickerell | 781 Words | Posted 6/2/2020 | Comments
One thing that has bugged me lately is the host of ads I receive almost daily offering detailed reports of "Global Stock Photography Market Potential Growth" for the next 5 years. I haven’t paid for or read any of these reports, but I am pretty sure they are all scans. I hope no one is throwing their money away on these reports, or worst yet, believing them. The creators of these reports ask unsuspecting interested parties for fees ranging from $3,400 to $3,960 to read their fanciful industry growth predictions.

Shutterstock Q1 2020 Financial Results

By Jim Pickerell | 1369 Words | Posted 4/27/2020 | Comments
Shutterstock has reported Q1 2020 revenue $161.3 million compared to $163.3 million in Q1 2019 and down from $166.4 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download remained flat at $3.42 per-image compared to Q1 2019 and down from $3.44 the previous quarter.

Design Pics Becomes Interim Manager Of Masterfile

By Jim Pickerell | 835 Words | Posted 4/7/2020 | Comments
Design Pics Inc., based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada has assumed the interim management of Masterfile during the bankruptcy process. Masterfile first filed to restructure its business in April 2017 and was unable to make any royalty payments to photographers after January 2018. According to information supplied to creditors by Harris & Partners, the insolvency trustee, as of March 3, 2020 Masterfile had total assets of $270,000 and total liabilities of $4,092,654.41. They owe royalty payments for the images they licensed to 530 stock agencies and independent photo creators.

Shutterstock Full Year 2019 Financial Results

By Jim Pickerell | 1392 Words | Posted 2/13/2020 | Comments
Shutterstock has reported Q4 2019 revenue of $166.4 million up 3% compared to Q4 2018 and up from $157.42 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download averaged $3.44 per image, up from $3.40 in Q4 2018. Total image and video downloads for Q4 were up to 47.7 million compared to 46.8 million a year earlier. At the end of the year Shutterstock had over 314 million images and 17 million video clips, for a total of 331 million pieces of content in its collection.

Shutterstock Historic Gross Revenue

By Jim Pickerell | 390 Words | Posted 12/22/2019 | Comments
A reader wrote, “Over the years you’ve published Shutterstock’s gross revenue number. It would be good to see the ratio of corporate earnings to photographer earnings after this weeks 1 billion horn blow.”

AdobeStock Revenue

By Jim Pickerell | 510 Words | Posted 9/4/2019 | Comments
For a long time, I’ve been trying to get some idea of the revenue AdobeStock generates annually. Adobe doesn’t share that information, but I’ve finally arrived at a strategy that may help. I’ve contacted a few of Adobe’s major contributors and asked them what their total royalty earnings were from Adobe in the last year and the total number of images they have in the collection.

Can Shutterstock Grow It’s Enterprise Business?

By Jim Pickerell | 534 Words | Posted 5/15/2019 | Comments
One of the big questions for Shutterstock is whether they can continue to grow the Enterprise segment of their business and how important that is to the eventual success of the company. In 2016 and 2017 they touted the success of Enterprise, but over the last 12 months Enterprise growth has been slowing and sales overall seem to be flattening.

Shutterstock Q1 2019 Financial Results

By Jim Pickerell | 1194 Words | Posted 4/25/2019 | Comments
Shutterstock has reported Q1 2019 revenue of $163.3 million up $6.7% compared to Q1 2018,  (excluding Webdam which was sold in the first quarter of 2018). The revenue was almost flat with the $162.1 million generated in the previous quarter. During the conference call CFO Steven Berns pointed out that traditionally revenue for Q1 is very similar to revenue in Q4 of the previous year. Revenue per download averaged $3.42 per image, compared to $3.40 in Q1 2018.

Shutterstock 2018 Financial Results

By Jim Pickerell | 1218 Words | Posted 2/26/2019 | Comments
Shutterstock has reported Q4 2018 revenue of $162.1 million up $6.7% compared to Q4 2017. (The comparison excludes the 2017 revenue from Webdam which was divested in Q1 2018.) The revenue was also up $9.5 million from Q3 2018. Revenue per download averaged $3.40 per image, compared to $3.33 in Q4 2017. (Much of this growth is probably due to increased sales of video content offered at much higher prices than still image content.)

Koch Industries Invests $500 Million In Getty Images

By Jim Pickerell | 316 Words | Posted 11/28/2018 | Comments
Koch Equity Development is expected to make a $500 million, non-controlling investment in Getty Images. Getty says the equity investment is expected to close by the end of this year.

Call To Action - (CtoA)

By Jim Pickerell | 667 Words | Posted 11/26/2018 | Comments
Recently I was told by a stock agency that my Photographer Income Survey Results were not relevant to Specialist Agencies because the results are “rather negative and don’t offer a possible positive call to action.” In the following series of stories I will outline a “Positive Call to Action” for stock agencies.

CtoA 4 - Present To Getty

By Jim Pickerell | 1014 Words | Posted 11/26/2018 | Comments
Once the data has been collected then it will be time to talk to Getty – as a group. For years they have shown they are unwilling to pay attention to suggestions from individual agencies. The more Specialist Agencies that participate in the analysis the better.

CtoA 3 -Agencies Should Analyze Their Getty 2018 Sales

By Jim Pickerell | 1254 Words | Posted 11/26/2018 | Comments
In May I analyzed the sales of a few photographers who are major, direct suppliers to Getty. A major issue that all Specialist Agencies need to consider is whether the breakdown in the various price ranges in this analysis are representative of Getty’s total sales? Specialist agencies need to check their own figures against this baseline to determine if this is an accurate representation of Getty as a whole.

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.

Market Size and Where Market Headed

By Jim Pickerell | 1567 Words | Posted 11/1/2018 | Comments
I’m regularly asked for my thoughts on the size of the worldwide market for stock photography in terms of gross revenue and the potential for market growth. I currently estimate the worldwide sale of stock imagery to be about $2.75 billion divided among four different product types - Microstock, Creative Stills, Editorial and Footage or Video. Further details of the breakdown are provided in this story.

Getty Debt

By Jim Pickerell | 1330 Words | Posted 9/18/2018 | Comments
Many in the industry are concerned about the level of Getty Images debt and what that might mean for the future of the company. The following is some general information about the financial status of the company. It is not clear how the debt might affect the future. Getty Images has about $2.367 billion in debt. About $1.8 billion of that is in Term Loans at 4.37%. Back in 2012 they had about $2 billion in Term Loans so in the past six years it appears they have paid down about $200 million of the principal in addition to the annual interest. The terms of these loans is unclear and may vary.

Carlyle Out: Getty Images Back In Getty Family Hands

By Jim Pickerell | 168 Words | Posted 9/4/2018 | Comments
The Getty family is acquiring all of the Carlyle Groups 51% equity stake in Getty Images for about $250 million and rolling over about $2.35 billion of outstanding debt. The deal gives Getty Images an enterprise value of under $3 billion compared to $3.3 billion in 2012 when Carlyle acquired a majority stake in Getty. At that time Carlyle invested about $500 million in the company. It is believed that the Getty family has ended up owning a significant portion of the debt.

Editorial Photographer Income Survey

By Jim Pickerell | 587 Words | Posted 8/31/2018 | Comments
I have created a SurveyMonkey survey in an effort to gather data on the general income ranges of Editorial Still Photographers around the world. Go to this link to respond to the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PhotogIncomeSurvey Please encourage all editorial still photographers to respond to this survey. The resulting data could be very helpful to photography students, working photographers, the organizations that license rights to use editorial photography and those who purchase editorial photographs.

Shutterstock Q2 2018 Financial Results

By Jim Pickerell | 933 Words | Posted 8/1/2018 | Comments
Shutterstock has reported Q2 2018 revenue of $156.6 million up $22.6 million or 16.9% compared to Q2 2017. (The comparison excludes the 2017 revenue from Webdam which was divested in Q1 2018.) Revenue per download averaged $3.41 per image, an increase of 12% over Q2 2017. (Much of this growth is probably due to increased sales of video content offered at much higher prices than still image content.)