Shutterstock Royalty Rates: Is There A Disconnect?

Posted on 2/28/2017 by Jim Pickerell | Printable Version | Comments (2)

It is worth looking at recent Shutterstock statistics. In the conference call yesterday Shutterstock said they had over 190,000 contributors at the end of 2016. In 2016 Shutterstock paid out about $138.400,000 to contributors. If we divide the total number of images in the collection (116,200,000) into contributor royalties on average contributors received $1.19 per-image in the collection for the full year.

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Comments

Peter Dazeley Posted Mar 1, 2017
CFO Steven Bern is away with the fairies if he thinks that contributors deem the royalty rates as fair. How on earth can anybody make any money taking a picture, keywording it, uploading it, if it might possibly make a sale of $1.19? How does this rate represent value received by the client and how will the next generation of creators be able to afford to shot pictures that are needed with high production costs?

Andrew Brookes Posted Mar 1, 2017
I totally agree with Peter, at the end of the day creative choice and quality will be lost with fewer professional stock photographers remaining in the industry, perhaps clients might start commissioning more!
Andrew Brookes

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