Scott Braut, Head of Content at Adobe, is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the Digital Media Licensing Association (DMLA) (formerly PACA)
annual meeting in New York on Monday October 26, 2015 at 9:00am. Single session passes for the keynote address only are available for $65. For more information, see
here under events. (Hint: you may need to expand your window.)
Braut will probably provide some important insights into where Adobe Stock is headed. Here are some of the issues I hope he addresses.
1 - How many of Adobe’s 4 million customers are picture users? Many of Adobe’s customers are image creators that use Photoshop and Lightroom, but never purchase images. It would be helpful to understand the percentage of Adobe customers who actually use images and a rough estimate of the percentage of Adobe’s $4.35 billion in revenue they represent.
2 - What percentage of Adobe Stock image suppliers are also buyers? (Graphic Designers, Illustrators) I estimate that people who buy images have created about one-third of the images in the Adobe Stock collection. Is that in the ball park?
3 - How much has the Fotolia collection grown since Adobe took over?
4 - What percentage of Adobe Stock image creators are part-timers as opposed to people who are trying to earn their living from the work they create?
5 – What are your estimates of the number of images downloaded through most subscription offerings that never appear in an actual deliverable product – brochure, book, news article, website, etc? We know that many subscription downloads are only used during the planning or design stages of projects, or simply stored for easy availability in case they might be needed in future projects. Given Adobe’s strategy of only charging for images actually uses, not those downloads that are only used in project planning, Adobe’s subscription download figures will certainly be far less than Shutterstock’s roughly 100 million subscription downloads annually.
6 – Fotolia’s revenue is in the range of $100 million or roughly 2.3% of Adobe’s gross annual revenue. A good business strategy for Adobe would be to manage the photo supply side of the business in a way that would help grow the other 98% of their business – encouraging customers to become more dependent on Adobe Stock – but not necessarily maximizing the revenue generated from the use of those images. Given the Adobe Stock pricing strategy it would seem that maximizing stock revenue might not be part of Adobe’s strategy. Is that correct?
7 – Recently, Adobe gave free annual subscriptions to the 7,000 attendees at the Adobe MAX2015 conference in Los Angeles. How many customers have used at least one Adobe Stock image so far?
The company has also announced that they will add video content to the Adobe Stock collection in the near future. Attendees may learn more about when the launch will occur and the initial size of the collection. Braut may also provide more information about Adobe Stock’s Enterprise business where they provide additional support for license management, reporting tools, and unlimited usage of stock content in large print runs.
The answers to some of these questions may be considered proprietary, but it is information that would certainly be helpful to image creators in terms of future planning. Often, at these conferences, time is allotted for questions after the keynote speaker’s presentation.