A few months ago, I evaluated which countries most
Shutterstock providers come from.
Today, there should be some similar analysis of Adobe Stock's data, or Fotolia, because although the portfolios on both websites are identical, Adobe Stock will unfortunately see less information about it.
In total, data from over 462,000 vendors with a total of over 137 million files in the portfolio were analyzed. As a provider, anyone who has at least one file online counts.
The first thing we want to do is address the question of how big most portfolios are. To this end, I divided the portfolios into groups of ten-potencies.
More than 60% of all active portfolios have only ten or fewer images. At the other end of the spectrum, there is only one portfolio of more than one million images, that of
Africa Studio with over 1.3 million images. After all, 64 vendors still make it to portfolios with more than a hundred thousand files.
Unfortunately, it is also not taken into account that some large providers have even more than one portfolio. Africa Studio, for example, has another portfolio linked above, called "
New Africa" with over 175,000 images, and the Irish production company Wavebreak Media has at least six portfolios (
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6) with a combined total of more than 800,000 images, but the two largest portfolios contain "only" a total of 310,000 images.
| Images In |
Number Of |
% Total |
| Portfolio |
Portfolios |
Images |
| 1 |
98,088 |
21.20% |
| 2 to 10 |
183,268 |
39.61% |
| 11 to 100 |
111,727 |
24.15% |
| 101 to 1,000 |
47,647 |
10.30% |
| 1,001 to 10,000 |
19,882 |
4.30% |
| 10,001 to 100,000 |
2,006 |
0.43% |
| 100,001 to 1,000,000 |
64 |
0.01% |
| over 1,000,000 |
1 |
0% |
| |
|
|
| Total |
462,683 |
100% |
| |
|
|
Let's take a look at how many vendors there are that have reached which each ranking. The second column is the number of career sales with Fotolia or Adobe Stock that each contributor must have to reach the rank. Obviously, those who have been with Fotolia the longest are likely to have the most sales. This chart is in no way indicative of recent sales trend for any of the contributors.
| Ranking |
Sales Required |
Number |
Average |
Portfolio |
% Total |
| |
to Qualify for Rank |
Portfolios |
Portfolio |
Total |
Results |
| Diamond |
over 1,000,000 |
3 |
575,527 |
1,726,581 |
1.26% |
| Ruby |
250,000 to 999,999 |
40 |
117,405 |
4,696,200 |
3.42% |
| Sapphire |
100,000 to 249,999 |
218 |
36,495 |
7,955,910 |
5.80% |
| Emerald |
25,000 to 99,999 |
1,388 |
14,048 |
19,498,624 |
14.23% |
| Gold |
10,000 to 24,999 |
2,522 |
7,626 |
19,232,772 |
14.04% |
| Silver |
1,000 to 9,999 |
10,486 |
4,040 |
42,363,440 |
30.93% |
| Bronze |
100 to 999 |
7,687 |
2,278 |
17,510,986 |
12.78% |
| White |
Less than 99 |
321,614 |
14 |
4,502,596 |
3.28% |
| Infinite |
|
84 |
11,754 |
987,336 |
0.72% |
| Empty |
|
118,635 |
157 |
18,625,695 |
13.60% |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
| Total |
|
462,677 |
296 |
136,952,392 |
1 |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
Those who are attentive will notice the "Empty" column. These providers have portfolios of between about 20 – 940 images but no ranking had been assigned to them in the data we were able to collect. Experience has shown that portfolios of this size would have to be spread halfway evenly between the SIlver, Bronze and White rankings with some "Infinite" outliers in between due to criteria such as portfolio size, age of the portfolio, etc. There were very few "Infinite" portfolios with much larger average size that had not been assigned a ranking.
The mean values for silver and bronze in the list could be real as slightly below the values represented, for White something above that.
With 261 vendors having scored more than 100,000 downloads, the group of those who generate a lot of revenue is quite manageable. Even if we add the Emerald Ranking with more than 25,000 downloads, we only have 1649 providers. So the large proportion of sales (0.36% or one-third of 1%) go to relatively fewer providers. 71% of the providers have less than 1,000 sales and for many this is over a period of years. 69% of providers have less than 100 sales.
Logically, there is a correlation between portfolio size and downloads. That's why you can also see in the table above how big a typical portfolio is within a ranking. This also shows that my portfolio of just under 39,000 images and Ruby status has sold above average in recent years, because statistically I would have to have more than 117,000 images online to have that status.
Now let's look at the countries from which the most successful providers come. For this I only took into account the 1649 providers with more than 25,000 downloads each.
Here you can see the distribution of countries and their percentage weighting within this criteria (emerald status upwards).
| Country |
Position in Ranking |
Percent |
| |
(Emerald to Diamond) |
|
| Germany |
240 |
14.55% |
| Russia Federation |
213 |
12.92% |
| Ukraine |
140 |
8.49% |
| USA |
138 |
8.37% |
| France |
89 |
5.4% |
| Japan |
74 |
4.49% |
| Italy |
68 |
4.12% |
| Poland |
57 |
3.46% |
| Thailand |
52 |
3.15% |
| Great Britian |
48 |
2.91% |
| Spain |
44 |
2.67% |
| Serbia |
42 |
2.55% |
| Belarus |
39 |
2.37% |
| Czech Republic |
36 |
2.18% |
| Romania |
31 |
1.88% |
| Canada |
24 |
1.46% |
| Latvia |
21 |
1.27% |
| Austria |
16 |
0.97% |
| Turkey |
15 |
0.91% |
| China |
15 |
0.91% |
| Moldova |
15 |
0.91% |
| Slovakia |
11 |
0.67% |
| Estonia |
10 |
0.61% |
| Netherlands |
10 |
0.61% |
| Bulgaria |
10 |
0.61% |
| Other 51 Countries |
191 |
11.58% |
| |
|
|
| Total |
1,649 |
1 |
Here, the European origin of the picture agency Fotolia becomes clear, especially in comparison to this Shutterstock list.
By far the most top sellers come from Germany, the founding country of France is ranked 5th (instead of 20th place as at Shutterstock). After that, the large share of Eastern countries can be noticed, most notably Russia and Ukraine, followed by Serbia, Belarus, the Czech Republic and Romania. The lower wage and production costs make it particularly attractive for photographers of these countries to sell their pictures worldwide in euros or US dollars.
The large proportion of European countries – six of the most common countries are European – of well-selling suppliers is also historically explained: Fotolia had placed a very high value on localization at the time. Almost every European country had received its own country office early on, the website was quickly translated into many national languages and the photographers were encouraged to dismiss in the local language.
The region and the language of the saying were also very relevant when displaying the search hits. For example, a German customer was more likely to see pictures of German photographers and with German search terms. With the takeover by Adobe, the regional focus at Adobe Stock has decreased significantly, which is why the European photographers, especially the German ones, are now increasingly complaining about sales declines.
For fun, I took a closer look at the data of the German photographers, because this is a German blog. According to this, German photographers are responsible for about 3 million images and the average German successful portfolio has about 10,000 images online. The above restrictions see "blank" also apply here, but if we take the 14.55% as a guideline, it would be a total of about 5.7 million images of German photographers.