The best ways of marketing were email and banner advertising, but I needed images... and they were very expensive.
I opened up Shutterstock to the whole world. I created a contributor community that anyone could give stock photography a shot.
Stock photos are used everywhere on the Net. Chances are, the website you are on right now uses stock photos somewhere - maybe as the featured image of the blog post. This also means that there will always be a large market for stock photographers.
Shutterstock has evolved from an image-based marketplace for small businesses to a much broader platform, with a large and expanding addressable market opportunity.
Anyone can contribute images, and we sell them to designers and agencies all over the world.
Each time I went to create my website, I needed imagery. It was complicated to get, the process was expensive, I had to negotiate rights. I knew there had to be a better way.
As I saw more and more people buying the images that were happy buyers, and people selling the images that were happy with how the market was pricing them, I started to get the sense this could be the go-to place for businesses to get the images they need.
For those aspiring to make a living from travel photography, it's a sad fact that the boring shots are the shots that are going to make you money.
Every time someone downloads a picture, the photographers get paid about 30% of what we charge.
I started Shutterstock out of my own need. I'd previously created a few software companies, and each time, I struggled to find affordable images to use on my websites.
Editorial imagery licensing includes celebrity, entertainment, sports, and news images that capture what is happening in the world around us.
A large wildlife book, start to finish, could take one to two years, but then I would expect to get several good (nature) magazine features off the back of this, plus of course a lot of stock.
No one can deliver visual content like Getty Images.
The Getty family is thrilled to resume control of Getty Images, a business that bears our name and one we strongly believe in.
In some areas, [Getty Images has] more images than the rest of the market put together. But libraries are being built up at a terrific pace. A photographer in a lifetime will produce maybe a million images, and there are about 15,000 professionals at work out there.
Currently I am working on another three books, doing a lot of magazine work, am shooting for fifteen stock agencies, plus my own photo library - all this keeps me quite busy!
There's one site where you can buy pictures of me for five bucks a pop.
No one ever questions where all these pictures in magazines and books come from.
