
News about yet another newly achieved millions-of-images-count-milestone appeared from most of the well-known microstock agencies in 2009 about every second month. So generally no big thing.
But now for the first time it´s up to numbers with eight figures. Though already an old number a day later, Shutterstock, the inventor of the subscription model and as the first of the Big Four* microstock agencies, completed yesterday shortly before midnight local time NY its next milestone of 10,000,000 microstock subscripton images.
As known all over the place, the absolute number of images can, but must not necessarily be connected to the financial success of a microstock agency: iStockphoto currently shows roughly 6,3 million, Dreamstime 7,7 million and Fotolia 7,4 million - the latter surprising because Fotolia announced 8 million images two month ago in December 2009.
(Screenshot exclusively and courtesy of Shutterstock)
*I have excluded microstock newcomers like PixMac which predominantly
distributes external content from Fotolia and Dreamstime and reaches
10,185,000 images this way.
Update Feb. 16, 2010:
- Fotolia´s image-/file count:
So while on the topic whether or not Fotolia shows 8 million image files, Fotolia´s EVP NA Garth Johnson added: "Our count is over 8 million now. We separate the Photos and
Illustrations from both Vectors and Videos."
"All together, we have well
over the 8 million mark."