https://seekingalpha.com/article/4244296-shutterstock-inc-sstk-ceo-jon-oringer-q4-2018-results-earnings-call-transcript

Several references to testing pricing and packaging: "Pricing and packaging changes have been enabled by our testing culture and agile environment. " A rather opaque reference to business in the "e-commerce" channel - anyone have any clues what this means? "Across the e-commerce channel, we have developed an integrated marketing strategy with a focus on activities that deliver higher ROI conversion rate and customer lifetime value." Apparently e-commerce grew 10% last quarter which was the highest since 2015.

They talk about contributor "engagement" - without explaining exactly what they mean by that. I get why businesses want that from customers where their platform contains ads, but not what that could possibly mean - other than more uploads - for contributors: "Our contributor base is global and the ability to interact with contributors in their local languages has helped fuel the record high levels of engagement seen in 2018. "

Bad news for long time contributors is that there are now 650,000 contributors, an increase of 85% for 2018! No wonder 10% e-commerce growth means nothing to existing contributors

"We will continue to optimize our contributor experience with the goal of being the first place contributors go to, to monetize their content. "

There is one thing that makes an agency the first place contributors go and that's income. They can fart with the interface all they like but if the sales fall away, so will all but the newbie contributors (and in time that spigot will shut off too).

Other Q4 stats:

"... customer base grew by 3.5% to nearly 1.9 million customers. Paid downloads grew by 6.6% to an all-time high of $46.8 million. Revenue per download grew by 2.1% ... Our image library expanded by 42% to over 240 million images and our video library increased by 44% to over 13 million clips. Revenue growth ... was 6.7%."

The enterprise channel keeps growing in terms of revenue and was 41% of the total in Q4 2018 vs. 39% in Q4 2017. 66% of total revenue is from outside the US and about half of the non-US revenue is Europe. Contributor royalties were  26.7% which they describe as flat, but it was 28% not that long ago...

They expect 10-12 percent revenue growth in 2019. In the Q&A session they were asked about competition but wouldn't name it - I assume it's Adobe and that's why SS's Enterprise growth isn't what they predicted (but they don't directly say that).

Jon Originger makes some truly breathtaking fantasy statements about SS being picky with the content they add: "You can see that great growth rate 85% year-over-year, the number of contributors and the content coming in increases as well. So what we see with that is that we're able to pick and choose exactly the content. " If only the analysts bothered to look at the image spam explosion...

Remember when SS changed the interface for viewing our sales and made it more time consuming? Many contributors, like me, now have to click through several pages to see our sales when we used to see everything at a glance. Guess what all that extra clicking does? It increases contributor engagement, because we look at several pages instead of one and spend more time on the site. I theorized that was why they did it...otherwise making things more time consuming makes no sense.

And the report

http://www.wicz.com/story/40027109/shutterstock-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2018-financial-results

And if you follow my milestones reports, 70 million new images, now 241 up from 170 million. Not sure how to take the claim of 650,000 contributors, unless that's everyone with one image or more?

Anyway, happy reading.

Maybe they're counting all those new whackamole accounts. 

Thanks for bringing the highlights.

It looks like short story - content up 42-44% income up 6-7% plus lots of new contributors and much of the growth is in "enterprise" that regular contributors are not able to be part of.

In some ways it is amazing that my sales have held up as well as they have (dropping 50-70%). It seems like most of my sales are from images from 2010-2015, perhaps when they still had some quality control.

I think the focus of shutterstock is going for the high level "enterprise" market which is not going well I don't think they care much about their "Bread and Butter". I think the number of saleable images is growing much slower than all images. I see the share price has done well after these figures. Maybe its me thats wrong but I reckon in 5 years people will be writing about where Shutterstock went wrong. They are in denial about Adobe a company with huge resources and a household name.

Shutterstock Revenue Growth Rate Deceleration Continues
2015   30%
2016   16%
2017   15%
2018   14.7%
2019   10-12%

Yet they are forecasting long term 20% Growth......