The outlook for contributor earnings on Shutterstock?
In my post yesterday, I worried about the drop in earnings (in total and per online image) on Shutterstock, and as their financial results came out today, I did a bit of a calculation to help explain what is happening.
This was the picture of my portfolio’s earnings. Although I have continued to add new files, I am earning less from each image as the months go by. I first looked at the growth of the Shutterstock library. Back at the end of 2012, there were 23M assets (photos, illustrations and videos) on Shutterstock. In June 2016, there are now 92M assets – approaching four times as many! I thought it would be interesting to plot my portfolio against the overall Shutterstock library:
Before you fall off your chair, the number on the left hand side is 1000x higher than the real number to make it a bit easier to understand. My portfolio was actually 0.015% of the Shutterstock library in December 2012 and after growing just a little as a percentage, it dropped like a stone to its current level of 0.006% of the library. So the chance of one of my images appearing in a search is significantly worse because of the sheer volume of assets they now have.
I then plotted the average payment per month to contributors for each asset in the Shutterstock library. This includes video and well as images:
As you can see, that has been falling as well. I don’t mean that they are paying less per download – they are paying less if you calculate their payment per image/video accepted into their library which is how I have been calculating my $ per online image. You can see the decline which started at the beginning of 2015.
Basically, unless you can keep up the supply of high quality images at the rate that Shutterstock is growing, then you will inevitably become a smaller piece of the pie and your earnings will suffer. Just the way things are, I guess!
I am afraid that I, together with a bunch of beginners, are part of “your” problems (by “your” I mean, the problem of those who started much earlier and used to have a decent income there).
My port of little less than 300 pictures, alone, would not be a problem, but I guess that many of us together might contribute significantly to dilute the database.
Why Shutterstock has made de decision to take in many more contributors at the cost of having many more images to review and reject, sometimes from people that do not even read their rules and restrictions, I do not know. Growing the database indefinitely also seems to be istock’s (Getty’s) directive now. Aside from supposed property issues, which they are very strict about, I have not had a single image rejected there.
I am very new to this industry and the little i know I have learned from you, forum participation, and my limited experience. From that, I advance the hypothesis that the future of stock might rely on curated, niche-based, databases that can extract, from larger databases, high quality images on certain subjects. This will facilitate things for customers, who are often frustrated that they cannot find what they want without having to go through pages and pages of photographs.
Yes, I hear Stocksy does really well with a much more restricted collection of images. I may of course be wrong with this logic – perhaps great shots always rise to the top of the barrel!
Steve
I’ve heard that it is really to get in there. And note that Stocksy has only exclusive images.
But I was talking about something else, something like Shutterstock launching , in the future, a few theme-based collections that will extract from its database the high quality and relevant photographs. I haven’t heard this from anyone yet, it’s just an idea I’ve had that might come up in the future.
Yes, Stocksy is hard to get into and is exclusive as well. Hard to say if SS will create a smaller premium library. With their scale it would have to be created using some sort of artificial intelligence I suspect, but they are investing in technology so that might be feasible!
This morning I was browsing my SS port when I noticed a button on the top right that reads “Discover Offset.com”. When I click on it, it took me to a curated collection of RF images. I don’t know how long it’s been there, I am notorious for not noticing things, but this is what I was talking about: curated collections where designers and other users can more easily find their content, and which draw from the large pool of the database itself.
Interesting – I hadn’t seen that. None of my pictures seem to be there, even my best sellers. I’m not sure if you can apply or have to be invited, or they just pick them!
I don’t know if any of those pictures are there. I have a hard time thinking they would be accepted by normal ss reviewers. Not that they are bad, but don’t have the elements of stock photos.