Where have all the Shutterstock Enhanced License Downloads Gone?

The title of this post sounds like a song (although I think that was “flowers..”), but this month has seen a serious drop in the number of enhanced license downloads from Shutterstock for me as well as a number of forum members at the Microstock Group. I normally see four to six EDs from Shutterstock in a month (each earning me $28) and in July this has dropped to just one (and that came on the last day of the month! I did wonder if my series of posts about the sort of images that are downloaded with this enhanced license had anything to do with it, but I think that is a stretch! Of course it could just be random, but I have a feeling that something has changed in either the way Shutterstock are presenting images to buyers, or, hopefully, it is just a summer lull.

This got me thinking about my history of EDs on Shutterstock, which broadened into a question about whether the steady upload of images to Shutterstock was also turning into a steady growth of earnings from the site. Here are the results of the analysis.

First of all, percentage of earnings from EDs. As the graph below shows, the percentage of my income that comes from each group of licenses (I combined single sales and EDs in this one as they both normally result in a reasonably high revenue per download) had not particularly changed over the past 18 months. It goes up and down as a single ED can make a big difference to the results, but there isn’t much of a trend overall. Translated into actual dollars, there is the obvious growth in earnings from Shutterstock, but not growth driven by any one download category. Single Sales are relatively new, and have grown to become something pretty valuable, with a couple of $18 single downloads in July, for instance. What is obvious is that I have had a steady and reliable stream of enhanced licenses, which dried up in July. I have to go all the way back to June 2011 to find another month with no downloads. It will be interesting to see what August brings – hopefully a return to the previous months pattern!

Percent of earnings per category

As the analysis deepened, my next graph compares the number of downloads and monthly earnings with the number of files I have online on Shutterstock. Over the past 18 months, I have made a big effort to get more images online – partly from travels and partly from more studio shots. I grew from 1359 in Feb 2011 to 2849 at the end of July 2012. At first glance, I found the slope of the downloads and earnings graphs to be a bit disappointing as it looks like I am soaring upwards on online files, but going up much more slowly on downloads and earnings. However, graphs can give the wrong impression sometimes, and so on to the next layer of investigation – earnings per download and earnings per online file.

Growth in files and earnings

Earnings per download and per online file

This one tells a story that is much more positive than the simple graph above. Here we can see that the dollars per download has been going up over time (with obvious peakiness) from somewhere around $0.55 per download in early 2011 to $0.70 in mid 2012. Dollars per download is not something you can manage in any meaningful way, but the second line on this chart is more interesting. This shows the earnings per month per online image – taking all my images into account whether they have ever individually sold or not. Here the graph is stable at around $0.20 per image per month. So it does show that adding images (assuming they are reasonably saleable) each month does directly tie into increased earnings, and so, once I get to 3000 images, I should be able to rely on monthly earnings of $600 from Shutterstock – 4000 images would be $800 a month etc.

Final conclusion – I don’t know, yet, if the zero enhanced downloads in July was a flash in the pan, but the general direction of Shutterstock is still positive – add images and your income goes up!

Earnings per category