Stocksite Analysis: Shutterstock 2008

Shutterstock is the largest subscription site for royalty free images around. Shutterstock is typically a high volume site – sales wise – with only a few pennies for the photographer. Due to the high volume sales, the total revenue from Shutterstock rates amongst the highest in royalty free sites.

Shutterstock remains one of the sites without maximum upload limits for photographers. Together with the short review time of approximately 1 to 2 days,  this results in extremely large quantities of new images per week (occasionally exceeding 70.000). As consequence, new images tend to be downloaded a couple of times when the image is fresh, to then fall into oblivion amidst the millions of other photos. Only a handfull of images retain ther momentum, and are downloaded more frequently.

Recently,  Shutterstock successfully introduced ther “On Demand” system, with considerably highter revenues for the photographer, offering the ability to customers to buy a handfull of images when needed, in stead of having to sign up for their subscription schemes, allowing 25 or more downloads for a period of at least one month.

Core statistics

• URL: http://www.shutterstock.com
• Revenues: $0,25 per download for the first $500, then $0,30 until the account balance reaches $1500, $0,33 until $3000, after which revenues per download increase to $0,36 per download
• Perks: An extended licence has a fixed revenue of $28, On demand downloads generate $1,48 or $2,56. Furthermore, $0,05 is added to your account for a backup on CD, as well as for both buyers and contributor referrals
• Downsides: The high number of weekly uploads reduces exposure and initial sales peaks of newly uploaded images.
• Upload limits: none
• Image requirements: Reasonable. Any decent photo is accepted, but images with extreme lighting and / or harsh shadows are frowned upon.
• Review times: once approved as contributor, it takes 1-2 days before images are reviewed.
• Penalties: Administrators and reviewers can issue warnings when large batches of images are rejected for being sub-par. After 3 warnings, you need to complete your application again to regain submitter rights.
• Forum: Shutterstock has a very active forum, but the content of the forums is mediocre, mostly friendly chit-chat. There’s barely any admin involvement in the forum.
• Service level: Service levels are high when the issue at hand is important (serious questions are treated and answered as such).
• Portfolio marketing: Shutterstock does not have any means of marketing your portfolio, other than on your own site through referral codes for buyers and submitters

Tips and tricks:

• Upload regularly, to maintain momentum in sales
• Quantity and portfolio size are essential to maintaining momentum in sales

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 22:13 and is filed under Reviewing our agents and tagged with agency, Shutterstock, Stocksite analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.