Wednesday 4 April 2007

Total number of photos on the Microstock sites

Shutterstock

I haven't provided the total number of photos on line recently so thought I would provide an update.

From a desingers point of view (they are the ones that buy the photos so are very improtant), the number of photos is very important, after the quality of the photos on the site. From a submitters point of view, we want what the the designers want but we also want to have a bigger share of the total online photos (ie. if you have 10% of the photos on the site, you should earn more than if you just have 0.1% of the photos online).

Therefore, it is intersting to compare the number of photos on each site. So here gos. These are from the last time I looked but give you an indication:

Fotolia 2,820,839
shutterstock 1,671,459
istockphoto 1,576,000
dreamtime 1,093,949
bigstockphoto 997,000
123RF 700,000
StockXpert 478,000
Featurepics 229,550

Well, as you can see Fotolia is the biggest, but there total number is disputed as it may include rejected images. shutterstock claims to be the biggest and Fotolia hasn't said anything to dispute this.

dreamtime made it to the 1 million recently and bigstockphoto is nearly there to.

I am earning more from StockXpert than their total numbers suggest so number of photos cant be used as a direct proxy for earnings.

As an interesting comparison, the macrostock site Alamy has over 8 million images.

No comments: