Job not paying enough? Mortgaged up to the eyeballs? Finances in the red? There is hope! Well, sort of…
Shutterstock is a website i’ve stumbled upon that pays you money for providing photographs for their royalty free photograph library. According to the website
Shutterstock is the largest subscription-based stock photo agency in the world. Our outstanding collection of premium, royalty-free images grows every day, with photographs, illustrations, and vectors you won’t find any where else
Rather than Shutterstock generating the content themselves they rely on an army of over 64,000 users to upload images to create an enormous repository of UGC images (in excess of 2 million). Whilst Shutterstock makes money in facilitating the availability of the images online the individual users make a commission each time an image of theirs is downloaded.
Currently each photograph downloaded earns the photographer $0.25 – however the system is tiered such that once photographers break through certain barriers their commission increases. For example reaching $500 results in a $0.05 increase per download to $0.30.
So, everyone gets what they want – the subscribers get the content they want and Shutterstock and their users/photographers make money. Since the money from downloads is shared it motivates the users to provide more images. This in turn means subscribers get a wider selection of higher quality content and, as the content becomes bigger and better, more people subscibe, more money is made and so the cycle continues… in practice anyway.
UGC, its great isn’t it!
That sounds just a little like iStockPhoto and a few others, so what’s their USP in a crowded market?
Ade, I agree! Shutterstock is no different from iStockPhoto… Shutterstock has a larger library: Shutterstock has 2,246,942 whilst iStockPhoto has 2,051,000. But that said I have no idea of the relatve quality of each sites images so the extra 200,000 odd might not be overly significant if its all dross!
The post was less about promoting Shutterstock over its rivals and more just my interest in the structure of sites like Shutterstock and iStockPhoto that monetise UGC in a way that keeps everyone happy.
…infact this idea is even more relevant as YouTube have picked up the model and as of today they have begun to have adverts in videos splitting the $20 per 1000 views with the creator.