Shutterstock have announced reaching 1 billion dollars paid out to contrubutors. The figure is calculated across all sites in the shutterstock network, bigstock and offset, and includes both royalties and referral commissions.

The graph shown in their blog post immediately caught my interest - not sure why but graphs with dodgy axis always scream out at me... (this was indeed quite inconvenient when watching Al Gore on his scissor lift)

The numbers plotted out on a linear scale are shown below, a distinct slow down in payouts since 2015 is revealed.

Recently on this same subject Shutterstock enterprise grown is gone on seekingalpha (investment website, cached version of this still to be found on google) points the slowdown at shutterstock having exhausted growth through their enterprise customers.

From a contributors perspective, assuming you submit to both shutterstock and also adobe stock/ex fotolia then I think there is little to be concerned with in the short-medium term.

• Printer Version
• PDF version