Shutterstock (
www.shutterstock.com) has delivered more than 200 million licensed image downloads to its customers since its founding in 2004. This number far exceeds that of any other company licensing rights to stock photography. The company’s closest competitor in the microstock arena is iStockphoto. According to the latest figures from
istockcharts.multimedia.de iStock has licensed 116,134,740+ downloads. (The + probably represents a few thousands above this number.)
In conjunction with this milestone, Shutterstock has released an infographic that provides a number of findings about visual media trends. (See
http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120201/NY45576)
"Serving over two hundred million downloads has given us a powerful glimpse into emerging visual trends, and the ways that people use images to tell stories," said Jon Oringer, Founder and CEO of Shutterstock. "We've seen a dramatic increase in the popularity of vectors, for example, and shifts in the types of images used to represent certain themes."
In 2005 vector graphics that allow designers to scale and recolor the image as needed only represented 5% of the company’s total downloads. In 2011 there were 16 million vector downloads representing 32% of total downloads.
The infographic also demonstrates how the visual vocabulary is evolving."Searching the word 'networking' used to return images of handshakes and business contacts; now it's all about online social networking. Additionally, it has been interesting to watch stylistic trends like vintage and graffiti-inspired graphics make their way around the world. Being at the intersection between millions of customers and hundreds of thousands of contributors, the content and activity in our marketplace is an ever-changing reflection of the world around us," Oringer added.
Keywords used for searching in 2004 and 2005 such as “social, cloud, network, green, like, mobile” now often have totally different meanings. When it comes to illustrating concepts customers tend look more for graphic illustrations than the photo realistic images they purchased in the past. Other subject areas that were in high demand in 2011 were 6 million downloads of textures and 5 million of vintage subject matter.
Some of the popular subjects are:
| |
Images in |
Downloads |
| |
Collection |
Since 2004 |
| Cats |
120,000 |
407,000 |
| Graffiti |
43,000 |
196,000 |
| World Disasters |
31,000 |
124,000 |
| Social Media |
5,000 |
102,000 |
| Royal Wedding |
4,000 |
79,000 |
| Green Technology |
21,000 |
46,000 |
Shutterstock has more than 17 million images in its library.