Microstock Statistics :: iStockphoto Top 500 Contributors

I recently revisited the istockcharts website in hopes of gaining a bit more insight into the world of Microstock.  Looking at the top 500 contributors, in terms of downloads, I was able to sermize a few things about iStock and the industry in general.   Please note that 64 contributors were "xxx" out at istockcharts and the reliability of the data may not be exactly accurate, but interesting data all the same.

I found it very interesting to take a look at the data in excel and sort, average, and develop stats for this list.  Some observations:

• Of the top 500 contributors at iStockphoto, they joined on average in May 2005, with the first contributors joining in Feb 2002 and the last contributor in the top 500 joining in May 2008
• On average they have 2,275 files online the max being 16,289  while the min is 151
• The total files combined for all these contributors was 991,990 and represents 16.8% of all the files currently on iStock.  
• What's interesting is that although they only represent 16.8% of the number of files they account for over 40% of the downloads (or 32,001,000).
• So the Top 500 in iStock (or top 436 in this case due to some accounts having no information) they only represent 1.5% of the contributors, but account for over 40% of the downloads!!

Some graphs and visual stuff to compliment the observations:

Total Number of Downloads for the Top 500 Contributors at iStockphoto

 

Number of Files Online Vs. Total Number of Downloads

So, it seems that I'm a very small fish in a very big pond!!

Google Trends & Microstock

I'm often curious to see trends on Google Trends, and also curious to see what I can gather from this site to better position my photography focus in future shots.  Hunting around for some various terms I came across some interesting comparisons.

General Market

Getty vs Corbis vs Microstock - Corbis seems to have been overtaken in this metric by istock around mid 2007.

Getty (red) vs Corbis (purple) vs Microstock (blue:istock, green: shutterstock, yellow: Fotolia)

Microstock Battle - istock seems to be declining slightly since the end of 2008, Fotolia seems to have a continuing upward trend, while Shutterstock seems to have had a plateau in 2009, with a spike in searches at the beginning of 2010.

Microstock Trends (blue: iStock, yellow: Fotolia , red: Shutterstock , green: Dreamstime, purple: 123rf)

Some Other Interesting Photo Topics:

Royalty Free versus Creative Commons
Film versus digital
Selling Photos versus Buying Photos

The searches above aren't exact by any means, but an interesting exercise none the less to gather a snap shot on topics.  Something to keep an eye on for ideas and research.