How Many Unique Images Licensed Annually?

Posted on 6/11/2018 by Jim Pickerell | Printable Version | Comments (1)

One of the big mysteries in the stock photo agency business is the percentage of “Unique images” licensed annually. Some agencies, like Shutterstock, report the total number of images licensed, but many of those licensed are used by multiple customers so the actual number of different, unique images used is much smaller.

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Comments

Thomas Wear Posted Jun 15, 2018
Both Adobe and Shutterstock allow for views of sales such as you describe above. Adobe sorts by number of downloads while Shutterstock sorts by money earned, but that still comes close to tracking with downloads since the majority are for the same amount, with a few outliers at higher fees. Alamy will show you all your sales, or all in a certain time period, but you can't sort them so that's limited value. Getty/iStock also shows images both viewed and downloaded, but only a month at a time, so that's limited usefulness.
Of course, this data is useful but not the only way to gauge performance and future needs. For example, a travel shooter with thousands of images is more dependent on long tail single sales but lots of them. For example, one photographer I work with has had over 4000 downloads of 1300 different images downloaded at one MS agency, but nearly half of those 1300 images have had only one download. That's out of a total of over 5000 images online with that agency. But the single downloads of very specific subjects continue to roll in, beside the multiple downloads of the bast sellers.
OTOH, if someone is shooting more commercial or conceptual stock, it should be possible to get a good sense of what concepts or approaches are doing better or worse by looking at number of downloads.

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