I came across this blog post written about Shutterstock 10 years ago (9 years and 50 weeks to be exact), entitled Shutterstock Reaches 10 Million Photos. The post shares some impressive statistics, which even many of the smaller stock sites today would be proud of.
10,004,906 royalty-free stock photos
104,906 new stock photos added this week
215,103 photographers
So 10 years later how do they compare?
Now Shutterstock has a phenomenal 319,172,096 royalty-free images, with 1,363,027 new stock images added weekly and over 1 million contributors.
In late 2018 Shutterstock reached a milestone of 1 Billion image, video and music licenses sold, and in late 2019 they reached a milestone of 1 billion dollars of royalty payments to contributors, which sounds impressive, but with a million contributors that’s an average of $1000 per contributor. So if you’re thinking of joining shutterstock as a contributor, just remember statistics show that you will probably fail.
There is one man who in the last 10 years can show some impressive statistics. Jon Oringer, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Shutterstock reportedly became New York’s first tech billionaire in 2013. He is rumoured to have bought the camera of his dreams and a sparsely populated island to practice with. 🙂
