Subscription
Some photographers are confused about how payments for subscription usage work. I received the following question recently: If say a customer pays $100 per month for the right to download 100 images, but only actually uses 20 images from the library during the month is the photographer royalty share based on 1/100th of what the library received, or does he get 1/20th of what the library received? The first works particularly well for Picture Libraries as they receive income for less work.
Shutterstock has produced a new resource called
The Shot List that may be helpful to anyone trying to keyword images. It includes some very broad general guidelines on the kind of imagery customers are looking for when searching for: Landmarks, People, Interiors and Religion and Holidays.
The investment banking firm
Jefferies has downgraded
Shutterstock shares from Hold to Underperform with a price target of $30.00. Shutterstock stock price closed today at $33.69 down 20% from $42.14 a month ago. The stock is down 52% from the high of $65.16 that it hit in September 2016.
A couple weeks ago
we reported that Google researchers had found a way to remove the watermarks used by most stock photographer and stock photography sites. To protect their watermarks Shutterstock engineers have designed a “watermark randomizer” that adds subtle inconsistencies to its marks, ensuring each one is a little different and making them difficult for Google to remove.
Shutterstock, Inc. has released its 2017
Contributor Earnings report, which features it’s milestone of having paid out over $500 million in the 13 years since 2004 to the Company's global community of over 225,000 photographers, illustrators, digital artists, and videographers.
Shutterstock has reported Q1 2017 revenue of $130.2 million. This revenue was up 12% from Q1 2016, but exactly the same as revenue in Q4 2016. Revenue per download increased 7% from $2.77 in Q1 2016 to about $2.96. Revenue per download in Q4 2016 was $3.02. At the end of the quarter there were 132 million images in the collection and 6.9 million video clips. This was up from 116.2 million images at the end of 2016.
Getty Images has been focusing on
growing its subscription business. The theory is that subscriptions will make customers more dependent on the company for their future needs. Currently, subscriptions represent 37% to 38% of Getty’s Creative Revenue and about 50% of Editorial Revenue.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that it has signed an exclusive global distribution deal with World Surf League (WSL) to market and license imagery from WSL’s Championship Tour and Big Wave Tour Events. The deal also includes WSL’s extensive archive, showcasing thousands of pivotal moments from competitive surfing history.
Thanks to information supplied by
microstock.top concerning Shutterstock contributors and information from
Nationmaster.com regarding the average 2014 monthly salary from 162 countries, it is possible to get a better understanding of why more than 60% of the images in the Shutterstock collection are provided by Eastern European and Asian creators.
It is worth looking at recent
Shutterstock statistics. In the conference call yesterday Shutterstock said they had over 190,000 contributors at the end of 2016. In 2016 Shutterstock paid out about $138.400,000 to contributors. If we divide the total number of images in the collection (116,200,000) into contributor royalties on average contributors received $1.19 per-image in the collection for the full year.
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.
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.
Based on the number of downloads Shutterstock had in the
first three quarters it looks like they will report about 167,000,000 total downloads for 2016 when they report their full year numbers on February 27, 2017. Last year
they reported 147,200,000 downloads for 2015.
Twenty-five to 30 years ago there was a large demand for stock images relative to supply. Prices to use a stock image -- while reasonable when compared to what it cost to hire a photographer for an assignment -- were much higher than they are today. It was possible for a professional photographer to produce a lot of images that no one wanted to buy, and still earn a decent living from the few that did sell.
Recently, I was asked my opinion of what
Shutterstock could do to grow revenue? The questioner had come to the conclusion that there will be very little growth in coming years in the number of stock photo customer or the quantity of still images or illustration that each will use. He also feels that
iStock,
AdobeStock and even
Getty Images have priced their products very competitively with Shutterstock making it difficult for Shutterstock to simply raise prices.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that it has expanded its milestone
multi-year deal with The Associated Press (AP). Beginning this week, Shutterstock will distribute AP’s daily global photo output for license to customers based in the United Kingdom. Shutterstock’s enterprise customers in the United Kingdom will have access to over 30 million photos from AP Images.
iStock single image downloads appear to have continued to decline in the last half of 2016. Unfortunately, five of the 430 contributors that we tracked in the past have now disappeared. In the last report these contributors represented 544,000 total career downloads. It is unclear whether they have withdrawn their collections, or repurposed them under another brand that I am no longer able to track.
How many customers make maximum use of their subscriptions? Most businesses that offer subscriptions offer their customers much more than they can ever use for one fixed price. Some customers like this because they know exactly what their monthly costs will be regardless of how much they use the service.
Shutterstock supplies very little information about their Enterprise customers and how Enterprise sales work. Yet it is an extremely important segment of their business and critical to understanding the company’s potential for future growth. At the end of Q3 2016 Shutterstock had 35,000 Enterprise customers up from 24,000 at the beginning of the year, or about a 46% increase in 9 months. How much of that 46% is real growth?
I was asked recently if I am optimistic that Shutterstock will maintain its momentum in 2017? The short answer is YES, I believe Shuttrstock’s 2017 growth will continue on the same track as it has in the last two years. In 2014 revenue growth was
39%. In 2015 it was
30% and in 2016 it is expected to be around
18%. I expect the company will continue to maintain its
DOWNWARD trend.
Shutterstock, Inc. has signed an exclusive deal to distribute
SilverHub Media’s growing collection of imagery worldwide.
PicturEngine has gone public with a promotion to the 95% of design professionals that use stock photography. For the first time, buyers looking for a comprehensive all-in-one search tool can review and license photography from all industry sources – and get no duplicates.
Dreamstime, with over 50 million stock images, and more than 16 million users has added 10,000 new images to its now 20,000 image library of free images available at
www.dreamstime.com/free-photos.?? Dreamstime also uses artificial intelligence-driven data from its companion site
Stockfreeimages.com to dynamically adjust recommended image content based on user preferences.
With Getty’s announcement in late October of the
Unification Timeline that is due to take effect January 3, 2017 most iStock contributors have focused on the fact that the minimum guaranteed royalty for a subscription download would be $0.02.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that its vast collection of 100 million high-quality photos and illustrations is now accessible within Adobe Photoshop® software through its new custom built plugin. With more than 100,000 new images added every day, the Shutterstock plugin boasts the largest collection of photos and illustrations that can be licensed directly within the Creative Cloud desktop application.