Shutterstock recently turned 7 years old!

Some highlights from Shutterstock’s press release:

Today, Shutterstock’s library has over 12 million stock images and more than 200,000 stock footage clips. The site is available in 10 languages to serve a worldwide community of image buyers, and a fast, accurate search engine ensures customers can quickly find the images they need.

July 2003: Shutterstock is founded by Jon Oringer, president and CEO, who uploads 30,000 stock photos to the site.

February 9, 2006: Shutterstock is the first among its competitors to expand into stock footage.

August 5, 2008: Shutterstock launches “On Demand” subscription plans to further meet the needs of image buyers.

It makes me very happy to report Shutterstock hits 7 – but it makes me sad that I’ve done so poorly since I was such a slacker in the past!

Today Shutterstock announced that they are investing aggressively in search technology with a series of innovations in the first half of 2010.

Shutterstock’s recent search enhancements include:

• Saved Search and Search Alerts, features that empower image buyers to track topics of interest easily and automatically. Customers can receive free e-mail notifications when new images match a saved search.
• People Search, which identifies images based on the number of people in a photograph, as well as their gender, age, and ethnicity.
• An improved Similar Images Search, which recommends other images based on qualities such as keywords, image colors and models.
• A Real-Time Search engine, which indexes new images within seconds, rather than hours. Image and footage buyers will see fresh content faster, including up-to-the-minute editorial images.

Additionally, Shutterstock continues to refine its proprietary “Most Popular” results algorithm, which weighs keyword relevance, image download frequency, and other customer behavior. The search engine produces more accurate results than competing stock sites, and is especially precise with searches involving multiple words.

Search improvements benefit artists as well. Shutterstock crowdsources the talents of photographers, illustrators and videographers around the world who earn money when customers download their content. Real-Time Search means approved images and footage will appear on Shutterstock faster, and a “Newest First” search results page will always display fresher and more varied content.

“We pride ourselves on innovation and attention to the needs of image and footage buyers,” said Jon Oringer, founder and CEO of Shutterstock. “Building the stock image industry’s best search engine shows our commitment to our customers and confirms our leadership position among providers of visual content.”

Congratulations to John Batdorff of Chicago, Illinois, for winning Shutterstock?s 2010 Photo Safari Contest, sponsored by B&H Photo and Zozi!

Batdorff won a safari for two in South Africa, including three nights on safari at the Lions Sands River Lodge and three nights exploring Cape Town courtesy of Roar Africa, plus $2,000 which can be used towards airfare.

VERY nice photo for the win too!

I always mean to enter these things – and time gets away from me!? Congrats to everyone who entered and good luck in future contests!

Shutterstock announced today that it is a founding partner in Stockphotorights.com, an educational resource for image buyers backed by several major stock photo agencies.

Stockphotorights.com was created to educate image buyers regarding the legalities of image usage and to provide information and advice on how to license images with confidence. The site, which launched today, was created in response to a survey of image users that showed many gaps in legal understanding of picture licensing. Stockphotorights.com was built by Getty Images and has the support of leading industry associations PACA (Picture Archive Council of America) and BAPLA (British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies).

“Shutterstock’s collaboration with Stockphotorights.com reflects our commitment to ensuring fair and legal image use,” said Jon Oringer, founder and CEO of Shutterstock.

Shutterstock provides its customers with legal security and peace of mind by backing every file in its vast library with a $10,000 guarantee. Shutterstock will provide up to $10,000 to cover legal costs and direct damages for claims arising from the use of an image or footage clip licensed through Shutterstock. The guarantee covers key areas of liability, including copyrights, trademarks and rights of privacy and publicity.

So by now most of you know that Bigstock is no longer BigstockPhoto and 123RF has also redesigned.? I’m surprised for a few reasons:

* Shutterstock (who owns Bigstock now) said the redesign proves they want to move forward with BSP.? What’s the idea of that?? Just keep stock photo buyers happy?? I like it but I wish they’d let us submit to one place and distribute on both networks.? I have many images on BSP that aren’t on SS – I’d like them combined.

* Both 123RF and Bigstock went for the black/white/grey look.? Very simple, clean, easy designs. I’ll be honest – I like both.? But they look VERY similar now!

I’m glad stuff is where I’m used to finding it, somewhat.? Bigstock’s bulk tool seems to be gone, replaced with a much better one at a time engine.? Still wish it worked more like Canstock or even SS.? Submissions are so much easier at those places without the “delay” of javascript.? I don’t want smooth transitions – I want SPEED.

Bigstock listed a lot of new changes here.? I want to look at a few more closely.

• A new and enhanced search engine (interesting – will have to search my stuff later)
• Additional search engine optimizations for Google and others
• Improvements to the collection: checking metadata and enhancing the search algorithm

I’m interested to see how their changes play out.? I would love for BSP to kick it up a notch and remain a player, even growing.? We just saw IStock kill StockXpert and the contributor side of that pretty much sucked (told you I’d be honest!)? I would be grateful and glad to see Shutterstock market and push Bigstock for one-off downloads.

As far as 123RF, their official twitter (does Alex run this ship?) says “The redesign of 123RF is NOT the END, it’s only the beginning!”? I sure hope so!? I’d like to see the beginning of shorter wait times for reviews, less of the truly bad “poor lighting” rejects and of course more dollars and cents.? PS: Note to 123RF, fix the “Check FTP uploads” screen – it doesn’t scroll right.? It looks a right mess.

What do you think of the changes?? Good, bad, indifferent?

Ok so the previous record for funniest rejection reason belonged to Dreamstime for an image that had people in it but no visible faces.? I wanted to stay safe and therefore uploaded the model releases for those subjects as I had releases for everyone in the photo.

Rejected: No model release needed.

Now that’s hilarious stuff.? I’m impressed with the high comedy of a rejection for adding an extra release to an image with those people in it.? However, today, all has been surpassed.? In fact, I’m not sure this one from Shutterstock can EVER be topped.

Not approved. Reason: Approved.

Now it only took me a minute or two to realize “OHHHHH I already submitted the same image!”? That’s so rare for me that I make this kind of mistake I was in shock!? I have a very good organizational system and so it never crossed my mind.? But Not Approved: Approved.? That one made me laugh a GREAT BIG laugh!

Ahhhh!? I love this business.? Thank you funny reviewer.

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.

Hi & welcome back! NiltoMil is officially off and running again – I’m keywording, submitting, pushing images and then working on shooting some new today.? I’m going to be pushing some older images even though I know they won’t sell as well as I’d like simply because I want the momentum to begin NOW not in a month when I get new stuff edited.

I’m ready for 2010!? January will be a very poor month since I’m starting so late but February should show some recovery.

In the last 6 months when I was mainly gone:

• Shot weddings – and we have 4 other photographers who shot during that time as well.
• Sold my house/bought a new house – a fixer-upper.? We’ve been working on it almost everyday since Nov 20th for 12+ hours per day.
• Delved into the food styling/preparing/photo world.? I’ve read almost every post on Still Life With, Matt Bites, and many other foodie blogs.? I’ve devoured four entire food photography books including Rinder/Smith’s new book and Lou Manna’s classic.
• Redesigned our business brand
• Traveled to Maine, twice.? Traveled to NYC.

Now that I’m back my goal is to create an income that will pay my mortgage first, other bills later.? Our mortgage is $680.? This is an achievable goal that I do have to reach for. I’ll do a more extensive goals post in the next week or so but that’s the start of it.

Current BME: $575.46, July 2008

As if wedding season here wasn’t busy enough, we just bought a new house!

So here’s my shoot idea:? I’m going to shoot the ENTIRE thing.? Shoot the packing the moving out, the empty new place, cleaning it up, boxes packed, the moving van/truck, new colors on the wall, colors half on the walls as its being done – all sorts of moving concepts.

I’m very excited to get back to work.? The summer months are always an incredibly difficult time for me to concentrate on stock – we shot 20 weddings in 15 weeks and we have 4 more over the next 2 weeks.? After that, I’m FREE!? NiltoMil will be BACK and ready to rock.

Anyhoo – so BSP is now a part of the SS empire, SXP is part of the Getty universe.? It really is going to come down to those 2 until it starts to fracture again, isn’t it?? I love business – it’s so predictable.? Fracturing, consolidation, aging, breaking apart…

What’s up in your lives since the beginning of the summer?? Just update me – products (ISyndica? Lookstat?), people, places you’ve gone – I’m just interested in the people part of having this blog right now – what have YOU been doing since we last really caught up??

Ah June.? Smells of bbq, flowers and sales worth dog poop.

As always my chart (which was done on the 1st btw!) is here.? And for Lee who is self-proclaimed lazy, I’m posting a June chart:

The work … well … let’s see.? For the month I started strong and have had a terrible last two weeks.? I had some personal stuff come up that has interfered with “work.”? I would say for the month I did about 4 days of uploading at about 2? hrs a day so 8 hrs of work.? My income increased from last month by $47 and I earned a total of $455.02. I did no shooting for stock in June and added only about 160 new images to my galleries.? That’s consistent with the time I think I put in.? So my income increased slightly on very little work.? Eh.

Two BME’s – StockXpert continues to burn up the charts, continuing in 3rd on my charts behind only SS and DT.? CutCaster also earned $4.02 breaking the previous high of $3.19.? Heh.?? Other notes: Canstock had another Fotosearch DL, the 5th one in 5 months.? I like that.? I have many non-earners that may get permanently removed very soon.

At the halfway point of the year I think it’s important to take a look at where I am.

I’m not shooting enough.
I’m not editing enough.
I’m not uploading enough.

That about sums it up – decent return for almost no work I’ve done but wow, ok.? I am done playing around now.