Take a look at Jon Oringer’s $52 million home
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9562059/Billionaire-founder-Shutterstock-lists-oceanfront-Hamptons-home-52-million.html in the Hamptons on Long Island.
Shutterstock has 391 million images and clips in its collection. In the first quarter of 2021 licensed rights to the use of 45.8 million videos and images. This means that the average image creator licenses right to use one of their images in a quarter for about every 8.69 images they have in the collection.
The average revenue per download was $3.96. But, Shutterstock only pays creators about 26% of the license fee so the average creator receives about $1.03 per image licensed. Based on the images the average creator has in the collection each would receive about
$0.12 each quarter, or $0.48 annually for the images they have contributed.
Shutterstock have over 1,700,000 contributors so the average contributor has about 230 pieces of content in the collection. However, a few contributors have over 10,000 images in the collection and at least one has over one million. Thus, the median contributor has way fewer than 230 images with Shutterstock. Most photographers learn quickly that they are likely to earn very little for their efforts and stop contributing.
On the other hand, if Oringer paid creators a little more for each image licensed, he wouldn’t have been able to afford this $52 million home, or the $42 million new home he has just built in Miami's exclusive North Bay Road area.
Of course, the creators don’t need more money. They are happy with what they are receiving and keep shoveling more new images into the Shutterstock collection.