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Messages - Pickerell
26
« on: July 23, 2015, 13:47 »
Adobe has hired Scott Braut, formerly VP of Content at Shutterstock. He has been named Head of Content and will drive the companys overall content strategy and operations for Creative Cloud. Adobe says content is a strategic area of growth and focus as it builds a growing, strategic creative marketplace. Scott has over 20 years of experience in content licensing, product development, eCommerce, and digital media.
What kind of impact is this likely have on Adobe's ability to take market share from Shutterstock?
27
« on: June 17, 2015, 11:59 »
Thanks to Adobe Stock gross microstock revenue will start to decline. Let me explain why.
I estimate that about $143 million of Shutterstocks 2014 revenue came from subscriptions. Based on the $0.25 to $0.38 they are paying in royalties for subscription downloads and the fact that they say they are paying out 28% of the revenue they receive in royalties, it seems that they are earning about $1.25 for each image downloaded through a subscription. Thus, total subscription downloads were in the range of 114 million images for 2014.
We know that many of subscription customers dont actually use all the images they download in projects. They download extra images that they use in the design stage of their projects, or maybe just to have on hand in case they might be used in a project in the future. Because it is all part of the subscription price that allows them 750 downloads per month there is no additional charge for downloading these extra images.
The big question, and the critical issue as we look ahead at the Adobe Stock offering, is how many of these 114 million images were actually used in projects. Nobody, not even Shutterstock, knows.
With the new Adobe system customers can store extra images they select in the Adobe Creative Cloud, use them during the design stage of a project, keep them there for reference just in case, and not have to pay for any they downloaded until an image is actually used in a project.
It costs Shutterstock subscribers $2,388 for a years subscription. If we assume that everyone subscribes for a year that means that Shutterstock has about 59,882 subscribers. (Obviously, some subscribe for less than a year so this number will vary.)
Lets assume that these subscriber really only use an average 10 images a month (120 per year). It they switched to Adobe Creative Cloud they would pay $360 a year instead of $2,388. Gross revenue if all 59,882 were to make the switch would be $21,557,520 instead of $143 million. Suppose they use, on average 240 images a year, gross revenue paid out to Adobe would be about $43 million instead of the $143 million to Shutterstock. Thats $100 million in savings for the customers.
Another way to look at it is that the average Shutterstock subscription subscriber downloads about 1,900 images a year. Suppose these customers only use 1 out of every 3 of the images they download, or 633 per year. They can save money with Adobe and still have access to all the same images. At $2.99 per image they would pay Adobe $1,894 instead of $2,388 and they save additional money for every image less than 633 that they use.
A significant percentage of the Shutterstock images are also available on Adobe Stock. If the customer cant find what they want on Adobe they can always go to Shutterstock and purchase what they need as a single image for about $10.
Of course, all of Shutterstocks subscribers are unlikely to switch, and the switching will occur over time (a year or two), unless Shutterstock can do something to counter Adobes advantage.
But it is hard to see how Shutterstock can offer a cloud option that so perfectly integrates with Adobes other products, and even if they could one would think they would need to match Adobes pricing. Consequently, it is hard to see why a significant number of Shutterstock customers wont eventually switch to Adobe.
Anyone want to make a guess as to how many of that 114 million downloads were actually used in projects?
28
« on: June 06, 2015, 10:12 »
A Russian stock photo agent told me recently that a Russian photographer could live and support a family very comfortably on 50,000 roubles a month. At todays currency exchange that works out to about $886 per month or $10,632 per year.
An equivalent in the U.S. would be about $30,932. In both cases these figures are basically net profit after business expenses are paid so a stock shooter would need gross royalties of maybe twice as much as either of these figures for a comfortable standard of living.
The questions are: (1) Do these figures seem accurate? (2) Are figures for other Eastern European and former Soviet nations about the same or higher/lower? (3) What would be the average for your country?
This information is important because more and more of the best selling stock images are being produced by photographers from countries with a low cost of living. Photographers in Western Europe and the U.S have difficulty competing because the revenue needed to cover costs and show a profit is so much higher.
This is not to say that photographers in low standard of living countries should not be producing, or that some type of restrictions should be placed on them. But photographers in the West who hope to one day support themselves from their stock photography earnings should make a realistic assessment of their chances to compete.
What do you think?
29
« on: May 20, 2015, 17:06 »
Thanks Jim. My thoughts exactly. Some one should post this link in a new thread on SS. With Jims permission Only.
You have my permission to post the link on the SS blog. I'm happy to have as many people as possible read the article.
30
« on: May 14, 2015, 14:24 »
Shutterstock contributors may be interested in a long analysis Ive posted on why individual contributor royalties have been declining on average over the last couple of years. Based on the numbers it seems likely that the decline will continue. You can find the story here ( http://www.selling-stock.com/Article/declines-in-average-royalties-at-shutterstock) and Ive made it FREE for anyone to read. If you disagree with my analysis I would be interested in hearing your arguments. My analysis is based on averages. It may be interesting for individual contributors to compare their results with the averages to see how much better or worse their personal experience has been.
31
« on: March 10, 2015, 12:40 »
Tickstock: I got the quote from Shutterstock Public Relations in answer to my question.
32
« on: March 10, 2015, 10:43 »
Shutterstocks report yesterday of paying out $83,605,000 in royalties in 2014 raises a few interesting questions. While it is a lot of money it is only 25% of $328 million. Shutterstock has said they paid out about 28% of revenue collected in three of the four quarters in 2014 and about 30% in the Q3 2014.
It turns out that the $83,605,000 only includes Shutterstock sales. It does not include Bigstock, Offset or Weddam. If the $83 million is really 28% of revenue total Shutterstock sales would be about $298 million, not $328 million, or a $30 million difference. About can mean a lot, but I think it is safe to say that the combined revenue of Bigstock, Offset and Webdam was in the range of $30 million. It might even be more if the average payout was above 28% (remember that 30% quarter).
Based on everything they have been saying, I think they are earning very little from Webdam so about $30 million is split between BigStock and Offset. Any guesses as to which generates the most?
I also understand from Shutterstock PR that royalty rates for Offset are higher than our norm, due to the unique content somewhat above 40% on average. Also, they say they havent broken out the royalty rates for Bigstock which indicates they might be lower than 28%.
Any thoughts?
33
« on: February 25, 2015, 10:52 »
I understand that Getty Images has told bond investors that Q4 2014 revenue for its Midstock division (iStock, Thinkstock and Photos.com) was 15% lower than Q4 2013 revenue, despite its September efforts to simplify and lower iStock prices in order to attract more customers. Previously they had reported that Q3 2014 was down 10% compared to Q3 2013.
Are your iStock sales down more or less than the figures Getty is reporting? Or are you one of fortunate few whose revenue is steadily rising?
34
« on: January 14, 2015, 12:53 »
When Adobe takes over Fotolia will Shutterstock and iStock be forced to lower their Image-On-Demand (IOD) prices?
Since Getty lowered iStock prices last September non-exclusives images on iStock and Shutterstock images are priced about the same at roughly $10 per image for any file size. (Exclusive images on iStock require 3 credits so they are much more expensive.) However, Fotolia single images are priced 25% to 60% lower than Shutterstock on a yearly basis, and 60% to 75% lower if the customer purchases image packs on a monthly basis.
Adobe wants to integrate Fotolia into its subscription service, but it is hard to see how Adobe will be able to offer a single subscription price that will be a compelling reason for users to switch from Shutterstock, iStock and others to the Adobe offering.
Adobe will make it easy for its Creative Cloud customers to toggle back and forth between Fotolia and Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and its other programs. Then their selling point could be, Looking for images? Check out Fotolia. They have most of the same images youll find on other sites. And, Fotolias prices for single images are a fraction of what you pay on those other sites.
Customers will still buy the images through Fotolia, and then easily import their purchases to the Adobe software.
Will Shutterstock and iStock have to lower their prices to hang onto customers?
Will creators need to withdraw their work from Fotolia so Shutterstock and iStock can argue that the same images arent available on Fotolia?
What do you think?
35
« on: December 12, 2014, 13:09 »
Shutterstock's stock price has dropped 13.3% to $62.85, almost a new 52 week low after the Adobe-Fotolia announcement. Do any image creators think Shutterstock is in that much danger, or is this just another example of the Stock Market being totally out of touch with the market for stock photography?
36
« on: December 11, 2014, 17:45 »
How will it affect photographer royalties? Will a lot more images be licensed, or will more professional creative users of Adobe products use Dollar Photo Club instead of paying a slightly higher price to buy images elsewhere?
37
« on: December 05, 2014, 14:13 »
I've got a few images with iStock (very few) and $95 on account, but I didn't get the email. I wonder how many iStock contributors have not been notified of this change.
38
« on: November 10, 2014, 10:33 »
Thanks to Jo Ann Snover and robhainer for the information you shared.
39
« on: November 08, 2014, 10:45 »
Enterprise sales at Shutterstock are growing dramatically. About 500% in the last two years. I would like to get an idea of the average price per Enterprise download and how many total downloads they represent.
Based on the 3rd Quarter released on Thursday I estimate that total Enterprise revenue for 2014 will be around $60 million. A few Shutterstock contributors have told me that the average price-per-Enterprise-download come out to around $20.
On the other hand CFO Tim Bixby said Enterprise customers are enthusiastic about Shutterstocks Offset product and most of those images are selling at the $500 price point. I also know that the several photographers images are being licensed in the $200 to $350 range.
If the average is $20 that would mean that about 3 million of the 125 million 2014 downloads are Enterprise sales. That would also mean that there are not many of those $500 and $350 sales and there are a lot of sales for less than Image On Demand prices. On the other hand if the average price is $40 or higher then there may be Offset and higher priced sales, but the total Enterprise sales annually would be 1.5 million or less.
For purposes of comparison it may be worth looking at Gettys RM and traditional RF numbers for 2013. Earlier this years I analyzed the sales of several of Gettys major contributors and came to the conclusion that overall Getty licensed about 502,159 RM images and 1,126,126 RF for a total of 1,632,285 in 2013. They will probably license less in 2014. One wonders how many of the customers of Getty and other traditional sellers have turned to Shutterstock and how many New Users at the Enterprise price points there are left to find.
What do you think? What are the average prices of your Enterprise sales?
41
« on: September 13, 2014, 16:26 »
Find one of Yuri's images in the E+ collection on gettyimage.com where it will cost you between $45 and $429 depending on the file size you need. Then copy and paste a string of the keywords (7 or 8 will do) and go to iStock and do a search for that string of keywords. I think you'll usually find the image where you can buy it for $36 or less depending on the size of the package of credits you buy.
How long will Getty customers to figure out this hack?
How do you think this is going to work for Yuri (or anyone else with images in the Signature collection)?
42
« on: September 10, 2014, 14:18 »
Pixart
Thanks. That probably solves the problem.
Jim
43
« on: September 10, 2014, 12:53 »
Do all images submitted to Dreamstime now have to be submitted on an exclusive basis and not also licensed through any other microstock distributor? A friend who is trying to start submitting to Dreamstime found this in their TOS. "By submitting my photographs to Dreamstime.com for publication in their web site galleries for sale, I relinquish all copyrights and rights to sell and/or use the Media that has been submitted. I acknowledge that in exchange for this copyright release, Dreamstime.com is obligated to award a fee for each image submitted and accepted by Dreamstime.com and that the agency will set the fee for each assignment."
I though most people who have images on Dreamstime also have the same images with other distributors. It sure sounds like they want exclusive rights to any images submitted now. According to the language the photographer can't even license use of the image directly to a customer himself. Maybe it is just sloppy legal language that they expect no one to read. All comments will be appreciated.
44
« on: July 28, 2014, 13:43 »
The Most Popular search option used to show images in order of popularity based on the number of times each image had been downloaded during its life on the site. The first image shown was the one with the most downloads; the 2nd image was the image with the second highest number of downloads, 3rd had the third highest number of downloads and so on. This was true as late as the end of June 2014.
Now, based on examining the portfolios of contributors with many images licensed more than 1,000 times, I discovered that there is no longer any sequencing based on the overall popularity. For some of the best selling photographers the first image shown will have no more than a few hundred downloads and the second or third images shown may have fewer than 100 downloads. The most downloaded may be 4th or 5th, or buried much deeper.
Since many searches result in more returns than any customer has time to review, many customers have come to rely on the Most Popular search option. Their understanding has been that in a few pages they will see the images with a particular keyword that other customers have found most useful. That may no longer be true.
The new approach certainly has the advantage of surfacing a lot of images that customers may not have seen before, but it doesnt help customers find the images that have been most popular historically. Now, with any particular keyword some of a images that have been downloaded the most times may not be shown until the 400th or 500th return.
The key question is how the search algorithm decides which image to show first. I searched for woman computer office. The sixth most popular images only has 300 total downloads, the 9th has 10,000 and the 10th has 100. Interestingly, on this particular search seven of the top 20 images were created by monkeybusinessimages. What is the logic behind how these images are chosen?
Is Most Popular based on the number of downloads of a particular image in the last 30 or 60 days, or is there no basis on popularity whatsoever? If iStock felt a need to add a new search option why did they have to eliminate the Most Downloads option that many customers have come to rely on? There is no indication that iStock has explained, or intends to explain to customers or contributors -- the logic for this change. Is there a good reason for keeping everyone in the dark?
Does this new search option benefit customers? Most Popular could mean that in the last 60 days an image has been downloaded 10 times and that is more than most other images using the same search term were downloaded during that period. There is no indication as to what that number might be, but the customer will be able to discover that the images has been downloaded 300 or 3,000 times over its lifespan.
The new system may benefit photographers who are pumping lots of new images onto the site, particularly if those new images have been shown for a while near the top of the Best Match search return order. Photographers with a few best selling images, who may have cut back on the number of new images they are contributing could see a major decline in sales as it becomes harder and harder for customers to find their images. There are lots of unanswered questions.
Check out your portfolio and some of the search terms customers are likely to use to find your images.
45
« on: July 11, 2014, 12:43 »
For the last two years I have been tracking the downloads and number of images in the collection of 431 of iStocks leading contributors. Ive been tracking about half of them since 2009. This story ( http://www.selling-stock.com/Article/tracking-istock-downloads) is available for everyones review free of charge and explains the process I went through to gather this data. I believe these contributors represent about one-third of iStocks total downloads since the company was established. Of the total number of contributors 316 are represented exclusively by iStock and only 125 are non-exclusive. It will surprise no one that there has been a significant decline in downloads on average, but it is interesting to see that a few contributors are still doing very well despite the fact that many are seeing significant declines. Of this group 116 (27%) are illustrators, 214 or about half only do photography and the rest I have classified as Photographer/Illustrators. This last group has a lot of images in their portfolios that are clearly illustration, or heavily digitally manipulated, and some pretty straight photography. My guess is that many in this PI group earn their living primarily as graphic designers. They shoot some of their own photographs, and do photography on the side. They also recycle a lot of the illustration work they have done on assignments for clients. This group may also include some who are primarily photographers, but who have an expertise in digital manipulation. One of the interesting things is that on average the pure photographers have about 4 times as many images in their portfolios as the other two groups. The PIs average a little more than the Illustrators who have the fewest. On average Illustrators have 41.58 downloads per image in their portfolios, PIs have 29.82 downloads per image and Photographers only have an average of 21.64 images per download. The Photographer group represents about 55% of all downloads. Another interesting fact is that more images dont necessarily result in more sales. Some of the contributors that have added the most images to their collections in the last two years have seen the slowest growth in downloads. Only about half of the 431 contributors and remember they are among iStocks most successful have grown their portfolios by more than 10% in the last two years. And 94 of the 431, or 22% of these contributors have added no new images to their collections in the last two or they have reduced the size of their portfolios. Many of this 22% have seen greater growth in downloads in the two-year period than some who have been adding lots of images. A detailed analysis of all this is available in 4 stories on Selling-Stock.com. Each story allows you to easily compare numbers and portfolios of individual creators in order to enable readers to get a more granular understanding than just the averages of what has been happening. http://www.selling-stock.com/Article/istock-downloads-first-half-2014http://www.selling-stock.com/Article/three-categories-of-image-creatorshttp://www.selling-stock.com/Article/istock-more-images-does-not-increase-saleshttp://www.selling-stock.com/Article/is-rm-the-only-place-to-find-great-picturesThere is a modest fee for reading these stories because a lot of work was involved in gathering the data.
46
« on: June 24, 2014, 14:45 »
Thanks to all who responded and completed the survey. Bunhill was right that the survey hasnt produced much in the way of useful conclusions. And I sure wish there was some way to get comprehensive data for the industry. However, the only people who have any comprehensive data are Getty and Shutterstock and they are not sharing.
Nevertheless, I think what little data we can collect can be useful, and better than no data at all, as long as we recognize its limitations.
About 56% of the respondents sell in the RM and traditional RF categories and about 44% sell Subscription and Microstock. It seems that a good portion of the Microstock sellers also had sales in the Midstock category.
The $298 RM price may be high as twice as many said the gross fee for their sales was lower than those in the 5% range and even fewer said their average was higher. With the Traditional RF all three price ranges (Higher, Within 5% and Lower) had about the same number of respondents. From that I draw the conclusion that $133 is about the average for Traditional RF today.
Midstock had the smallest number of responses. There were slightly more Lower responses than Within 5% and almost no Higher responses. My general thinking is that Midstock would include Exclusive contributors to iStock, Stocksy, Alamy, the high end Fotolia and others in that category. It is sort of a made-up category, but Getty says that 75% of iStock revenue comes from Exclusive contributors and Im trying to get some sense of the number of licenses it takes to generate that kind of revenue.
Overall the average for microstock sales seemed to be lower than $6.50 and the Subscription sales seemed to be pretty much on target at $1.25.
As I said in the beginning, I wish there was some way to get more comprehensive data, but for me this is better than nothing. Thanks again.
47
« on: June 19, 2014, 09:20 »
In general, prices and revenue have been declining in the stock photo industry. To a large extent this has been due to oversupply and more and more customers finding the images they need at lower price points. Based on the information Ive been able to collect, I have made estimates of the average 2013 gross license fee for images in the five major price categories RM, traditional RF, Midstock, Microstock and Subscription. My figures can be found in the chart below. 2013 Downloads (est.) Average Price Rights Managed 1,300,000 $298 (my Getty est.) Traditional Royalty Free 3,000,000 $133 (my Getty est.) Midstock 5,000,000 $35.00 to $45.00 Microstock 44,000,000 $6.00 to $7.00 Subscription 130,000,000 $1.25 To get a broader cross section of data and opinion, I have prepared a brief 5 question survey ( http://www.selling-stock.com/Stock-Photo-Pricing-Survey.aspx) to determine if these averages are high or low based on my readers experiences. Many readers will only license images in one or two categories. Please check Not Applicable for the questions where you have no data. I am looking for gross license fee, not your gross income. Since many photographers will not have easy access to gross license fees averages can be determined by dividing your total gross income for the year by the total images licensed. In parenthesis, I have included some sample royalty percentages of the gross my gross license fee calculation to save respondents from having to make their own calculations. Photographers should look at the dollar amount next to their royalty percentage and determine if their average is higher or lower than this number. Exclusive contributors to iStock should consider their sales in the Midstock category. Non-exclusive contributors would fall into the Microstock category. In general I consider gross license fees that range from $1 to $20 for the largest file size to be Microstock and prices that range from $10 for the smallest size to $250 for the largest to be Midstock. Click Here To Complete The Surveyhttp://www.selling-stock.com/Stock-Photo-Pricing-Survey.aspx
48
« on: June 09, 2014, 14:36 »
it seems yuri needed another more account on istock http://www.istockphoto.com/user_view.php?id=11721662
It is very interesting that only 33 of the 682 images in the PeopleImages collection are at Signature+ prices. 649 are at the lower priced Signature prices. Nothing in Vetta.
49
« on: June 03, 2014, 12:55 »
iStocks sales seem to have been declining over the last few quarters. About 75% of iStock sales are at Midstock prices totaling roughly $180 million in 2013. There are indications that customers and creators are increasingly dissatisfied. One big questions is whether the decline is due to a generally higher priced offering, poor customer service including a less than optimal performing website, or both.
A year ago Yuri Arcurs observed that a rapidly growing percentage of his images were being licensed through low priced subscription offerings. He decided that if the trend continued eventually he would no longer be able to justify continued production of quality people images.
To get higher prices for his work his solution was to go exclusive with iStock and get an average 30 to 40 times the subscription price for each image licensed. I wanted to know how that is working out.
Yuris Numbers
With his original Yuri_Arcurs collection Yuri hit 1.5 million career downloads on iStock sometime in the first half of 2013. He is still listed as having 1.5 million plus downloads which means that he has had something less than additional 100,000 downloads in the last more than one year. When he went exclusive he had about 18,000 images in his non-exclusive collection on iStock.
After going exclusive iStock created a separate Yuri collection. His 1,257 best selling images from the Yuri_Arcurs collection were moved to the Yuri collection. All of them have been downloaded from iStock more than 200 times and 294 of this group have more than 1,000 downloads each. Currently the Yuri collection has had between 54,000 and 55,000 downloads since it was established. It is not clear why there are two collections as all the images in both collections are exclusive.
In the past year Yuri has added a huge number of new images to his collections, many of them produced by photographers who were trained at his 2012 boot camp in Cape Town. Yuri wholly owns all of these images. Now he has 123,751 images on iStock: 45,826 in Yuri_Arcurs and 77,925 in the Yuri collection.
I estimate that in 2013 there were about 179 million microstock images licensed worldwide at the following average price points:
Midstock 5,000,000 $35 to $50
Microstock 44,000,000 $6 to $7
Subscription 130,000,000 $1.25
I asked Yuri if the higher fees from the Vetta and Signature collections is making up for the lost subscription sales from Shutterstock and all other agencies he was dealing with prior to going exclusive.
Yuris Response
While not answering my question directly, Yuri provided some interesting insights on what he feels is the future of Midstock.
Having just spent 3 days at GI in New York and today in Seattle with the IT exes I believe that very interesting things are in the pipeline for IS. Did I have a say in the upcoming changes... Yes - for sure. That being said. The GI top exe dev guys are highly competent and more flexible and agile towards change that I would have imagined. We are working on a set of core site improvements that will dramatically improve user experience and ultimately sales. Only thing that I can say now: Give IS three months and see the changes for yourself.
Shutterstock might be in for a bit more competition than they expected, especially if GI has me project managing the develoment team and we utilize the two things GI has that nobody else has: 1. The best images in the world. 2. The best editors in the world. The best images displays that the world has ever seen is just around the corner. Watch this space!
50
« on: May 19, 2014, 08:36 »
The chart below shows some of the trends in downloads relative to the number of images in the Shutterstock collection since the beginning of 2012. These numbers indicate that while Shutterstock sales per quarter have been steadily growing the number of images in the collection have been growing at a faster pace. Thus, the odds that any given image will be licensed is steadily declining.
To arrive at our percentage number we simply divided the total number of images in the collection into the total downloads. (The image and download numbers below are in millions.) Shutterstock reports the number of images and the number of video clips. We add these two numbers together for our image number since the downloads number includes both images and clips.
Some images are downloaded many times and others not at all. Thus, the actual percentages for each quarter would be much lower, but we suspect the trend would be relatively the same.
Number Number Percent Image
Images Downloads Licensed
Q1 2012 18.8 17.6 94%
Q2 2012 20.2 18.3 91%
Q3 2012 21.7 18.7 86%
Q4 2012 23.3 21.4 92%
Q1 2013 25 22.4 90%
Q2 2013 28 24.3 87%
Q3 2013 31.3 25.4 81%
Q4 2013 34.5 28 81%
Q1 2014 37.1 29.7 80%
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