As of January 19, 2017
Shutterstock had 119,292,457 royalty free stock images in its collection according to www.microstock.top. They had added 1,352,852 new stock images during the week.
If you go to the Shutterstock site, it says they have “Over 100 million royalty-free stock images/over 800,000 new stock images added weekly.” Shutterstock used to regularly supply and update of the number of stock images on its site, but once they hit 100 million it seems they have decided not to bother updating further.
I recently discovered
www.microstock.top which provides some very detailed breakdowns of Shutterstock contributors. It is unclear how frequently they will update this information, but it is the kind of information that can help everyone in the industry – Shutterstock contributor or not – have a better understanding of Shutterstock’s business.
Microstock.top has used
archive.org/web/ to search thousands of creator portfolio pages at www.shutterstock.com. This is not hacking, fishing, use of an API or insider information. These are pages that are accessible to everyone. There used to a website called http://istockcharts.multimedia.de/ that provided daily updates of similar information about iStock contributors. They stopped providing that service in the spring of 2012. We hope microstock.top will continue to update the information they have supplied on a regular basis.
Photographers, Illustrator/Vector Artists
According to microstock.top at the end of 2016 Shutterstock had 1,679,000 registered contributors, but only 164,900 had more than 0 images. Evidently a lot of people sign up, but never submit any images, or couldn’t get any images accepted.
Of the 164,900 only 14,373 (8.71%) had more than 999 images in their portfolios. The total images of the 14,373 were 91,700,000 or 77.06% of all the images in the Shutterstock library as of January 19, 2017.
Of this 14,373 with more than 999 images in the collection there were 3,671 (26%) where their home countries were not identified. The other 74% break down as follows:
| Countries/Regions |
Contributors |
| U.S. Canada, Mexico |
856 |
| Russian Federation & Ukraine |
2964 |
| Eastern Europe & Former Soviet |
441 |
| Germany, Poland, Italy, UK, Spain |
1476 |
| Rest of European Union |
1405 |
| Asia, Australia, New Zealand |
2568 |
| South & Central America |
98 |
| Africa (46 in South Africa) |
65 |
In addition, there were another 829 contributors that don’t fit neatly into any of these groupings. It is interesting to note the number of contributors who live and work in the Russian Federation and Eastern Europe. In addition, there are three times as many contributors in Asia as there are in North America.
The top 10 countries with the most images in Shutterstock are:
| Country |
Images In |
| |
Collection |
| Ukraine |
9,920,419 |
| Russian Federation |
8,314,965 |
| Thailand |
7,960,642 |
| United States |
4,377,154 |
| Poland |
2,408,190 |
| United Kingdom |
2,086,978 |
| Germany |
1,862,617 |
| Romania |
1,857,136 |
| Spain |
1,602,637 |
| Belarus |
1,472,245 |
| |
|
| Total |
41,862,983 |
There were also 27,731 videographers with more than 0 video clips
| Country |
Clips |
Videographers |
Average |
| |
|
|
Clips Per |
| |
|
|
Videographer |
| Russian Federation |
681,847 |
2444 |
279 |
| United States |
660,560 |
1973 |
335 |
| Ukraine |
471,822 |
1555 |
303 |
| Thailand |
265,449 |
3261 |
81 |
| United Kingdom |
241,411 |
688 |
351 |
| Canada |
149,019 |
364 |
409 |
| Italy |
144,355 |
673 |
214 |
| Germany |
141,016 |
698 |
202 |
| Poland |
137,969 |
342 |
403 |
| Romania |
92,459 |
295 |
313 |