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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.
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.
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.”
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.
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 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.
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 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, 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.
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 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, 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The market for editorial stock photos is quite different from the commercial market. Shutterstock may be having a difficult time adapting. In January 2015 Shutterstock
purchased Rex Features for $33 million. At the time it was believed that Rex’s gross 2014 revenue was about $7 million.
Storyblocks, formerly Videoblocks will generate about $30 million from licensing stock imagery in 2017. Currently, they have a little over 200,000 subscription customers who pay $149 a year for unlimited access to about 115,000 video clips. They also offer about 200,000 photos, 200,000 vectors and other illustrations and 100,000 pieces of music for a separate subscription price.
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.