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In this post, we review Shutterstock and how much money stock photographers can expect to make there. Shutterstock used to be our best-selling stock photography platform before 2020. But, after that, this has no longer been the case.

How to Become Shutterstock Contributor

To become a Shutterstock contributor, anyone can sign up. You will need to submit a certain number of images to get an initial approval first. And, that’s it. After that, you can freely submit photos and videos.

You will need to provide a valid address and a payment method. Shutterstock pays to its contributors using many pay platforms such as PayPal, Payoneer and Skrill monthly.

One thing to keep in mind is the weekly limit. Shutterstock contributors can submit up to 500 photos and up to 100 stock videos in any given 7 day period.

Getty and Shutterstock Merger

As you probably know, Getty Images and Shutterstock announced a merger. The merger is pending. Our take is that this merger is not exactly good news for freelancers. Getty Images pays much less to contributors compared to Shutterstock. If I were Getty and wanted to jack up my income, cutting Shutterstock contributor payouts would be the first thing on my to-do list.

First, let’s take a look at Shutterstock’s stock price. Since the merger announcement on January 7, it declined to below $20.

If we read the merger terms, it says that Shutterstock shareholders can get about $29/share in cash with other options and merger proration present. So, it is very perplexing that Shutterstock’s stock trades at such a deep discount over 30% to the buyout price. That tells me a few things. First, the stock market expects this merger to fail. Or, there is a chance that Getty and Shutterstock will renegotiate their merger terms.

My take is that the former is likely the cause of this decline. In other words, the US government will object to the merger. Why would they object? Because the combined company will control a large chunk of the stock photography market. It could be in the realm of 40%-50%.

I don’t know whether we should cheer this development or be sad about it. Shutterstock overall is not doing well financially speaking. Either way, Shuttertock may cut contributor payouts again even without this merger to stay afloat. Let’s see how we got to this point.

Shutterstock’s Recent Financial Performance

If we look at Shutterstock’s total sales, we may get the impression that the company is doing well. There is consistent growth, right?

Well, this is not so, especially over the last several years. The thing is that most of this revenue growth came from acquisitions of other companies. Shutterstock has been on a buying spree lately. They bought Pond5 in 2022 and then Envato in 2024. If we strip out these acquisitions, Shutterstock’s content sales are not going anywhere. Here is the breakdown of their sales by segment.

Content includes all the typical licensing of stock photos and videos. The data segment gets revenues from licensing metadata to AI companies to train their algorithms. We see that data sales are exploding. But, the bread and butter of Shutterstock’s business is not doing so well. It has been stagnant lately with a slight uptick in 2024.

Why Shutterstock is Doing So-So Financially?

If you ask Shutterstock why this is so, they have their answer in their 2023 10-K:

I have no idea what that means. Shutterstock offers were not good enough? Or, buyers found better deals elsewhere, like at Adobe Stock. I don’t know the answer. But, I can tell you one thing. Our income from Shutterstock has been going down over the past 2-3 years. At the same time, our Adobe Stock sales are doing incredibly well.

If we look at Shutterstock’s paying subscribers, their count declined by 11% on average each year. Paying customers have been leaving Shutterstock platform big time. Why would this happen? We can only speculate.

Maybe, people find free stock photo websites as an acceptable alternative. Or, perhaps AI imagery is eating Shutterstock’s lunch. Or, worse yet, buyers find better deals elsewhere, like at iStock or Adobe Stock. This is a big headache and problem to solve for Shutterstock.

True, we saw that data licensing to AI companies helped Shutterstock. But, how long that will last? OpenAI and the likes are always hungry for new data. If Shutterstock has no new data to train on, AI companies will move on to something else.  

If we look at images and videos in Shutterstock’s collection, we see a material slowdown.

Image count grew from 771 to 800 million in 2024 and video count grew from 54 million to 59 million in 2024. That’s the lowest growth I have seen so far.

It is not a surprise why. Shutterstock angered many contributors after cutting their payouts in 2020 amid the Covid pandemic. Before 2020, Shutterstock payouts were based on fixed rates. Now, it is percentage-based with tiers and hoops to jump through. Let’s take a look at that.

Shutterstock Contributor Payouts Explained

First off, Shutterstock does not offer exclusive collaboration to contributors (at least publicly). Their percentage pay depends on downloads for a given calendar year.

Royalty for images start at level 1 with 15% pay to contributors. Once your cumulative downloads for a year reach 100 images, congrats, you graduate to level 2 with 20% and so on. For stock videos, they have a similar pay structure. But, of course it has different download counts for each level.

Also, if stock images or videos get licensed for AI data training, contributors get a fixed 20% cut.

Depending on how many photos and videos you have, you can get stuck at a certain level. For instance, I have close to 17,000 stock images on Shutterstock. I usually go through several tiers in 3 months and reach level 5 in 4-5 months.

With videos, it is a different matter. Although I have over 5,000 stock videos, I get stuck at level 4 with a 30% cut in the middle of a year.

I don’t know how many downloads an average stock photographer gets at Shutterstock. But, as I will explain a bit later, my wife and I are probably somewhere in the middle of the pack.

How Shuttertock Subscription Pricing Translates to Contributor Payouts

Let’s take a look at subscription plans that Shutterstock offers. Let’s start with images.

Image Subscription Plan Pricing

We see that a plan for 50 downloads per month costs $99 for. Let’s suppose that you reached level 3 with a 25% cut. Shutterstock generates $1.98 ($99 ÷ 50) in sales from each photo for this plan. A stock photographer at level 3 gets roughly 50c ($1.98 x 25%) out of it.

The problem arises with large subscription plans. For example, take a plan that costs $199/month for 750 downloads. Each download generates a measly 27c in sales for Shutterstock. For a stock photographer with a 25% cut, he gets 7c, right? The answer is no. In case of large plans like this, Shutterstock pays 10c per download to contributors.

It is hard to imagine how Shutterstock makes money off these large plans. Maybe, these customers don’t download all 750 images a month. That way Shutterstock gets to keep money left on the table.

Stock Footage Subscription Pricing

Next, let’s take a look at stock videos. Here, we see that Shutterstock offers a plan of 10 videos for $159 ($15.90/download). Let’s assume a stock photographer at level 2 gets 20% cut from video licensing. With $15.90 in sales, his cut is $3.18 ($15.90 x 20%). Notice how the pay per download is significantly higher for videos compared to photos.

On our blog, we mentioned many times that selling stock videos these days is a must. The stock image segment is oversaturated with a large number of photos. For this reason, stock images pay less.

But, there are much fewer stock videos. Hence, stock photography platforms offer better terms to video contributors. This is true at least for now. On top of it, many platforms offer AI images, but very few offer AI videos, if any at all. This creates a more favorable pay structure for stock footage. So, if you are not uploading stock videos, I urge you to reconsider.

On another note, Shutterstock does not allow contributors to upload AI images. Neither does Getty. To my knowledge Adobe Stock is one of the few three major platforms that allows submission of AI photos. The ironic thing is this. Both Shutterstock and Getty allow its customers to use generative AI to create and license AI photos on their platform.

Shutterstock Enhanced License Plans

Okay, so the subscription plans I showed you before came along with standard terms. But, Shutterstock also offers so-called enhanced license plans. Enhanced licensing comes along with better terms. Among these terms are usage of content for merchandising, advertisement and so on. Enhanced licensing costs multiples of a standard subscription plan.

In our experience, enhanced licensing happens, but not very often. But, when it happens, we sometimes earn $100 or more from a single download. That’s right, this means that a customer paid over $300 for just a single photo or video.

Stock Photos Pay per Download at Shutterstock

Now, let’s take a look at how much you can expect to earn per each licensed image. To give you a background, I have close to 17,000 stock images. My wife has 25,000 images.

I would say that our image portfolio is average, but somewhat diverse, which helps. A lot of our images are from our travels and have a good mix of landscapes and cities. We submit a lot of editorial content too.

So, in the past 12 months for images, my wife and I earned 65c in pay per download. Because my spouse has more images than me, she reaches higher levels faster. This partly explains why her pay per download is slightly higher, but still pretty close to mine.

If only I could come back in time, I would submit our content from a single Shutterstock business account. That way, our combined earnings would have been much higher.

Our Best-Selling Images on Shutterstock

As for our top five performers, here they are. We can see that the top performer generated a lot of income from only a few sales.

These sales likely came from enhanced license packs I talked about earlier. But, there are other top performing images that earned money from lots of downloads. Our take is this.

Stock Videos Pay per Download on Shutterstock

Next are stock videos. Here is our quick background. I have close to 5,100 stock videos, while my wife has close to 1,300 stock videos.

I personally enjoy creating stock videos. I have many time lapses, slow motion, cinemagraphs and real time footage in my portfolio. I also use gimbal often to record stock videos. Gimbal has been a game changer in our stock photography business. Take a look at this DJI Ronin gimbal, which was instrumental to our success in stock photography.

Okay, so on average, we earned about $11 pay per download for stock videos. My spouse generates slightly lower pay per downloaded videos. This is so because she has few videos that prevent her from reaching a higher level. For example, I reach level 4 for stock videos in the second half of the year, while my spouse stays at level 2.

As a quick comparison, we earned 80c per image download and $6.70 per video download on Adobe Stock. We see that our pay per download is slightly higher on Adobe for stock photos. But, for videos, it is almost 2x less. That was surprising to me.

Adobe Stock pays a fixed 35% cut to contributors for stock videos. Of course, this is higher compared to Shutterstock on average. My explanation for this difference in video sales between Adobe and Shutterstock is this. Probably, we had more enhanced license sales on Shutterstock compared to Adobe Stock.

Also, don’t forget, Adobe Stock does not accept editorial footage. And, we have plenty of it for licensing on Shutterstock. That was also a contributing factor. There are some best-selling editorial videos on Shutterstock that Adobe did not accept.

Why Having a Big Portfolio is Key in Stock Photography

So, we see that, on average, stock videos earn 20x more than stock photos. This was true for the past 12 months in our case. But, earnings from Shutterstock also depend on volume, not just pay per download. The problem with stock videos is that they generate fewer sales than photos.

Still, if I were starting stock photography today, I would put most of my focus on stock videos. My prediction is that this is where most money will be made in the foreseeable future.

Also, all this underscores an important aspect of stock photography. Stock photography is a numbers game. The more stock photos and video you have, the more you will sell and earn. With pay rates climbing down, this becomes even more important.

Photoshop Plugins for an Efficient Workflow

And, this brings me to the importance of having an efficient workflow. If you want to improve your workflow, we recommend using Photoshop plugins to speed up your workflow. We are very selective when it comes to plugins. They can get very expensive.

One set of filters we use often to edit photos comes from Nik Collection plugins for Photoshop by DxO. They are incredibly useful in creating color profiles that are hard to replicate on your own. All this happens fast with the press of a button.

Also, Nik Collection includes many more valuable tools. Among them are Nik Dfine for denoising, Nik HDR Efex and many more. We partnered up with Nik Collection to bring a 15% discount to our viewers. Use our link and an exclusive coupon code “BlokhinFilms” to get 15% off your purchase.

Shutterstock Company-Wide Sales per Download

Now, let’s come back to Shutterstock. Shutterstock used to disclose how much sales they generate per download. In 2023, it was $4.72. This number is a combined metric for both stock photos and videos. For some unknown reason, this number has disappeared since 2024.

Let’s assume for a second that an average stock photographer gets about 25% of that. Then, an average contributor probably earned $1.18 per download in 2023. Again, this assumes that this average contributor has a good mix of photos and videos in his portfolio. And, that’s about what we earn on Shutterstock if we average out our photo and video earnings per download. Of course, this is our experience. Depending on your portfolio and level, you will earn less or more.

Overall, our Shutterstock earnings have been in decline. This is not surprising given that Shutterstock’s content sales were going down too. Our income dynamics just reflect what’s happening at the company level.

Concluding Remarks on Being a Shutterstock Contributor

It is not clear what’s next for Shutterstock. What if their merger with Getty falls through as the stock market expects? Then, things may get worse for Shutterstock on its own.

Related Content: Our Best Selling Stock Photos Part 1

They will resort to cutting contributor payouts even more. I don’t think that it will bode well for Shutterstock. Their image and video collection is not growing as it used to. If contributors leave or stop uploading, Shutterstock will be in big trouble.

For now, they have been buying other companies to make up for their stagnating core business. But, for how long can they do that? At some point, they may run out of companies to buy or money to pay. I tend to think that they will run out of money sooner than later.

We have many more tutorials on our blog to help you improve your workflow and maximize your income. Check out our other blog posts on stock photography.

What are your thoughts on Shutterstock? How will they fare with or without Getty on their side? How much do you earn per download on Shutterstock? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.