microstock

As of 5^th August 2008 Shutterstock introduced the so called OD (on demand) offer/ sales. People that where reluctant to buy a full subscription (starting at $249/month for 25 image licenses/day) can now “test the waters” with an investment of $49, enabling them to purchase the license to up to 12 images. This post tries to evaluate the advantages/ disadvantages for buyers as well as contributors alike.

Just to get the basics straight: Image libraries like Gettys (expensive) or Shutterstock (affordable) exist because people need images for different uses like web, print, print on demand. Not everybody can take a good photo, make a good illustration or simply has not access to places/ objects etc they need images of. These people license images from image libraries. And others submit content to be licensed via such sites Todo claro?

Shutterstock is and was mainly a subscription based risk model. People buy a subscription that allows them to download up to 25 images/ day for a certain amount of money (the price depends on the license/ prospective use of the image). It is a risk-model because profit is made on the assumption that only very few buyers will download every single day their full allowance. What is true, my experience as a supplier of images to Shutterstock shows that I sell only 20% of the licenses I sell on weekdays on weekends, proofing the point that not everybody downloads there full share. Back to the new, additional, OD model.

Shutterstock maintained previously a site where people could buy the license for single images at a much higher price. They gave it up sometime in 2007 due to lack of volume. In August this year they introduced the new on demand model, basically a time independent subscription for up to 12 images (depending on the size). As a contributor to Shutterstock I have seen over the last few months that this model was hugely successful, increasing not only my total number of downloads but also subsequently my overall earnings. In my opinion the success of this new model is due to several factors:

Buyers, as stated above can test the waters, investing only $49 instead of previously $249, this a) opens new markets as it attracts also buyers that need only a moderate amount of image licenses and b) allows buyers to test the image quality available before committing a larger amount of money.

Image suppliers like photographers or illustrators feel more better when they get $0.81-2.85 instead of $0.25-0.38/ download, encouraging them to submit more images of higher quality to the site.

Disadvantages: None really, it is a win-win situation for everybody! In the beginning there were fears of dropping subscription sales but these have not been confirmed.

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