For a long period of time Shutterstock is remaining the leader for stock photography industry and main source of income for photographers who are supporting their business with contributions.
Today I would like to say a few words about changes and tendencies which are fading Shutterstock business and lowering their status in the industry. Some of tendencies are lasting for the years, the others are rapid and look like “inclination to suicide”.
From the beginning the process of reviewing and acceptance of images at Shutterstock was completely illogical and unprincipled. However just to say it's inconsistent is not enough.
It’s showed as a target policy by lowering acceptance rate of contributors. For the years of contributions I can describe it as intermittent events when images suggested for reviewing were dropped with not related comments and argumentation.
I had a number of times when completely sharp, screeching image was declined with argumentation of “The main subject is out of focus or is not in focus due to camera shake, motion blur, overuse of noise reduction, or technical limitations of the equipment used (e.g. autofocus searching, camera sensor quality, etc).”
Or when just another picture of the same building was declined due to “A property release is required for this submission but was not provided” despite the several pictures of the same building were already accepted and sold multiple times.
Here is an example of such "selectivity" on the reviewing process.
Images below were accepted by Shutterstock without property release:
Image below was declined by Shutterstock due to missing property release. However Adobe Stock accepted it without a question.
After dropping a number of images acceptance process returns back to the normal (reasonable) behavior.
On the other hand Adobe Stock unlike Shutterstock has much more reasonable process and argumentation on declining images. If their principles violated it’s often happen in the favor of a contributor.
In the past I was able to re-apply unreasonably declined images on Shutterstock and they can be accepted later, however nowadays you cannot re-apply it at all,the image will be recognized as previously reviewed and declined inevitably. By the way, a few of my best selling images were accepted within repeating attempts.
There were at least two changes which I marked as “inclination to suicide” category.
The first one is lowering payments to the contributors and resetting compensation rate at the beginning of each year. Worth to say that Adobe Stock has increase contributor's payments at the same time. It was pretty violent change regarding to contributors and only lazy dog didn’t bite Shutterstock for this move.
Another change is the recent update of Shutterstock web-interface. It was done due to web-GUI technology development. I know you cannot stop on spot when the industry move forward, but it was done with poor analysis of the end user experience. And it’s just confirming – something going wrong with Shutterstock business development.
The contributor web-portal became out of range by the size, my monthly sales are not fitting to the page on 4K monitor in the end of the month, when all 30 days are on the list. The number of clicks and scrolls were increased significantly. I’m spending much more time for reviewing the same information I’ve seen through the old interface.
I think these changes will have a deferred effect on the company’s business. The smaller part of contributors were leaving Shutterstock in the protest in the past, a bit bigger part will just stop contributing to their portfolios and start looking for other opportunities for selling their images online. Big agencies and contributors with big portfolio will continue to work with Shutterstock, but their preferences will gradually migrate to the other companies with the time.
This is true that stock images industry is living through increasing competition for the years, and probably its fastest growth period is in the past. However it’s hard to understand why the industry leading company is going to the road side direction instead of keeping higher speed on central trajectory.
All of these changes and tendencies are making Shutterstock less and less preferable in compare to the rivals on the market.
If the tendencies described above will not change, then I’ll be not surprised when Adobe Stock became number 1 on this market.No doubt that Shutterstock is still in power and enjoying the biggest crop of margin in stock photography. But nothing last forever, and hungry rivals will start pretend on Shutterstock’s peace of pie pretty soon.
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