Microstock
Shutterstock has reported Q4 2019 revenue of
$166.4 million up 3% compared to Q4 2018 and up from $157.42 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download averaged
$3.44 per image, up from $3.40 in Q4 2018. Total image and video downloads for Q4 were up to
47.7 million compared to 46.8 million a year earlier. At the end of the year Shutterstock had over 314 million images and 17 million video clips, for a total of
331 million pieces of content in its collection.
A reader asked recently, “Is it true that Unsplash is now getting more downloads than Getty, Shutterstock and Alamy combined?” According to
Unsplash’s statistics page they currently have
70,263,886 downloads per month. Based on Shutterstock’s last
quarterly report they have about 15,433,333 downloads monthly. Their downloads per quarter haven’t changed much quarter-to-quarter over the last two years so I think this number is a pretty good average and not really growing.
Freepik Company, a platform of free and exclusive graphic content, has signed Rod Oliveira to a newly created position of Chief Marketing Officer in a move to strengthen an area of great strategic relevance for the brand.
Shutterstock has launched its ninth annual
Creative Trends Report, identifying global and local trends that will influence design aesthetics and visual culture in 2020.
Shutterstock Custom assignments seem to be working well for some contributors. Below you will answers to my questions from two of of the more successful Custom Assignment contributors, Adrianne Haskins and Jeremy Pawlowski. Haskins is based in Tenessee and Pawlowski in Portland Oregon. To see Pawlowski’s work check out this
link and for Haskins work go to
this site.
An
iStock Exclusive photographer asked, “Given that Getty is ‘racing to the bottom’ and is about to eliminate Rights Managed from its collection, do you think our Exclusive contracts will be next?" I don’t think so. It seems to me that it will still be to
Getty’s advantage to keep the Exclusive segment of iStock.
According to Reuters, the website of communications watchdog
Roskomnadzor has said that one of
Shutterstock’s domains was blocked in Russia on November 13th by the country's Attorney General because the site contained "insulting state symbols."
For over a decade image creators have been discouraged by Premium Access pricing. I believe PA was first instituted around 2006 as a way for Getty to get a guaranteed monthly payment from some of its largest Enterprise clients rather than the company be being subject to the erratic monthly image needs of some of these customers where they might purchase a huge number of images one month and little or nothing the next.
A lot of the images being uploaded to major websites these days have little relevance to what the market needs. I decided to do searches on
Shutterstock for country names to try to get some idea of the number of images from each location relative to what the likely demand is for such images.
I was asked recently what I thought Shutterstock could do to grow revenue. My answer was not much. I don’t think it will be possible to grow the downloads very much. Shutterstock has focused for several years on growing the number of Enterprise customers. But, I don't think that is likely to work either. The one thing they could do is raise prices on at least some of the images they license. See my thoughts on why this is a good idea that they are not likely to adopt.
Getty is shutting down all Rights Managed licensing on
www.gettyimages.com. This may effectively be an end to the entire marketing strategy of pricing stock images based on how they are used. While there are still a number of small and mid-sized agencies that continue to price images based on usage, it seems highly unlikely that they will be able to continue to build their image collections or attract many customers in the future. Every stock photographer and stock agent should read
this explanation of Getty’s plans for “phased retirement of rights-managed creative images.”
Shutterstock has reported Q3 2019 revenue of
$159.1 million up 5% compared to Q3 2018 and down slightly from $161.7 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download averaged
$3.40 per image, which was the same in Q3 2018. Total image and video downloads for Q3 were
46.3 million, up from 43.9 million a year earlier, and down from 46.6 million in Q2 2019. At the end of the quarter Shutterstock had over 297 million images and 16 million video clips, or
313 million pieces of content in its collection.
Depositphotos has launched a new series of
photo collections to battle stock photo cliches. The company’s content curators repurpose stock photos and compile collections on a weekly basis to highlight photos that are not typical stock photography.
Shutterstock has released a
background removal tool as part Shutterstock Editor users can now easily remove the background from any image in the Shutterstock collection or their own images. (Shutterstock images must be purchased before they can be modified.)
Shutterstock’s ongoing efforts to make the creative life of its customers easier continues with the launch of
reverse image search for video. This new feature makes it faster than ever to find exactly the right video clip in Shutterstock’s footage library.
In response to my story
RM Licensing No Longer Makes Sense Peter George Unger commented, “I have 9,200 images with Getty and every single one is RM. I am making on average $15,000 per year from them. Can you honestly tell me I can make more money than that on pathetic RF prices? for which they pay $0.25 cents per download. Which library would pay more then 15K on RF prices?
Storyblocks will be closing the Marketplace segment of its business on September 10th and moving back to a subscription only offering. Contributors who have outstanding payouts will receive those payments sometime after September 10th even if the amount owed has not met the minimum payout requirement.
Shutterstock has reported Q2 2019 revenue of
$161.7 million up 3% compared to Q2 2018 and down from $163.3 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download averaged
$3.44 per image, compared to $3.41 in Q2 2018.?? Total image and video downloads for Q2 were
46.6 million, up from 45.2 million a year earlier, and down from 47.2 million in Q1 2019.
Forbes Magazine has a story entitled “
Move Over Stock Photos, It’s Time For User Generated Content.” There certainly is an increasing demand for User Generated Content (UGC) and the market is being flooded with it, but there are a lot of unanswered questions regarding how much it is likely to take over the stock photo market.
Free Images may not always be FREE. There are not only big legal risks for the users, but also potential time demands on users, creators and lawyers. Most users of Free images don’t recognize the risks they may be taking. One of the big questions for professional photographers is how to help those looking for free images to understand these risks.
Recently, I received a press release from
Freepik.com. The name is a misnomer because not all the pictures on the site are free. They do have about
1,750,000 free vectors, icons and photos, all created or wholly owned by Freepik. In addition, they have over
4,185,000 Premium photos and illustrations supplied by about 8,000 individual creators and distributors of microstock. A little under half of the pieces of content are photos. The rest are illustrations, vectors and icons.
In olden days when stock photographers were trying to produce images that might be used as covers or full page inside magazines it was advised that they turn the camera on its side and shoot verticals of as many situations as possible. But times have changed. Are verticals really selling today? Recently Robert Kneschke reported on his
web site that he had reviewed 100 of his best selling images and not a single vertical was among the group.
It is interesting to note that when we searched the 210 individual collections and recorded the numbers in each the total came to
28,591,367. However, if you go to the site and search for all images you are only shown
26,240,654 images. For those who haven’t tried this you can simply go to
gettyimages.com, enter any keywords and hit return. When the return come up with the “Filter” option on the left hand side of the screen remove the keyword, leave the search bar blank and click again. Now, you will be shown all the images for the “License Type” you have requested. Be sure the “License Type” is set on RF or RM. Then you can go to “Collections,” choose the one you want and see all the images in that collection.
A number of iStock contributors interact on the Facebook “private” group for iStock. In reviewing comments and complaints for the last couple years there seems to be general agreement that sales started to decline in late 2018 and the decline has continued into 2019. This is compared to what sales were in 2017 and early 2018.
One of the big questions about Enterprise sales at Shutterstock is “Why do big customers want an Enterprise deal?” On average Enterprise customers are paying more per quarter than E-commerce customers. What additional services do they get? In 2018 Enterprise customers generated about 40.9% of Shutterstock’s total revenue, or about
$254.8 million. The average Enterprise customer pays Shutterstock $6,370 per year, but they could be getting 750 images per month for $2,388 a year. Maybe they are using a lot of video at $63.16 per clip, but there must be other benefits justifying the paying of the much higher fees.