A couple of days ago the counter at the top of the shutterstock website ticked over to 10,000,000 images - well actually that could be better described as "shot past 10 million at an astonishing rate". There are currently about 100k new images accepted each week. Only about 40% of uploads are high enough quality to pass shutterstock review process.
The milestone image was uploaded by Canadian photographer Matthew Jacques and can be seen here [3].
Matthew has been a Shutterstock submitter since 2006. He started taking pictures as a hobby, and recently used his Shutterstock earnings to invest in a professional-quality DSLR [4] camera and has branched out to shoot motor sports, weddings and portraits. “My hobby’s paying for itself” he says.
125 Million Downloads
The really interesting thing in the press release [5] was that for the first time shutterstock have announced the number of images that have been downloaded in total: more than 125 Million downloads since 2003. Making an 'average of 12.5 downloads per image' - on it's own that's a misleading calculation considering the range of abilities of photographers working in microstock [6] and the varying ages of images on the site. None the less, sharing this and their average acceptance rate is very useful, it makes shutterstock a yardstick to measure other agencies against. Unfortunately not all agencies are quite so open minded when it comes to sharing such info.
Read more about shutterstock in our review [7]
Visit the shutterstock photographer pages [8]