Shutterstock announced recently that it now has 10 MILLION images for sale.

“In a typical week, Shutterstock adds 80,000 new images ? a rate of nearly eight images every minute”

I wonder what this means for our future.? Will Shutterstock eventually stop carrying images that are 3+ yrs old and have never sold?? How can the collection be refined to provide better results and better images without growing so large any search result inevitably looks like the pages & pages & pages found on Google?

Alamy has grown so big it has basically swallowed itself.? Zazzle offers almost 30M products for sale yet very few ever sell.? Where is the balance between having these huge collections and having absolutely unfindable material?

I’m interested in what Shutterstock will do about the size of the gallery.

Another thing Shutterstock announced was “Shutterstock has delivered over 125 million image downloads to customers since its founding in 2003.”

Let’s do a little math (numbers should be close but obviously are not internal or “accurate”).? That amounts to 6 full years.? 20 million image downloads a year = 1.6M a month = 60,000 a day everyday for 6 years.

Over 12,000 sales I have averaged .40 per download.? Assuming this is fairly close to their own numbers (12k isn’t a small sample) then Shutterstock has paid out $5,000,000 to contributors over 6 years.

Approximately 1/2 of 1% of the gallery is downloaded on a typical day.? We know it’s not that spread out but that’s the amazing potential we have in microstock.