A couple of days ago the counter at the top of the shutterstock website ticked over to 10,000,000 images - well actually that could be better described as "shot past 10 million at an astonishing rate". There are currently about 100k new images accepted each week. Only about 40% of uploads are high enough quality to pass shutterstock review process.

The milestone image was uploaded by Canadian photographer Matthew Jacques and can be seen here.

Matthew has been a Shutterstock submitter since 2006. He started taking pictures as a hobby, and recently used his Shutterstock earnings to invest in a professional-quality DSLR camera and has branched out to shoot motor sports, weddings and portraits. “My hobby’s paying for itself” he says.

125 Million Downloads

The really interesting thing in the press release was that for the first time shutterstock have announced the number of images that have been downloaded in total:  more than 125 Million downloads since 2003. Making an 'average of 12.5 downloads per image' - on it's own that's a misleading calculation considering the range of abilities of photographers working in microstock and the varying ages of images on the site. None the less, sharing this and their average acceptance rate is very useful, it makes shutterstock a yardstick to measure other agencies against. Unfortunately not all agencies are quite so open minded when it comes to sharing such info.

Read more about shutterstock in our review

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