Is it really possible to grow a microstock database so quickly and maintain certain quality standards?
Roughly 12 days ago Shutterstock announced to have "hit two million images". Competitor Fotolia revamped its website and cleaned its image portfolio three weeks ago.
Fotolia´s new V2 started with 1.9x million images, equivalent to 40% images less than V1 with 3.2 million images.
Not only this writer, but a lot of observers were surprised that Fotolia´s new V2 image count was so close to the magic barrier of 2 million images.
No, Fotolia´s V2 did not start from scratch with 1,6 million images for example, or 1,8 million, or 1,85 million.
But with 1,9x million images.
Yesterday (local time 12:45 PM PST) Fotolia´s website claimed to showcase 2,002,494 million images. Roughly 12 hours later (12:58 AM PST) the image count was 2,004,096 (up 1,602 images), and at the time of writing six hours later already 2,008,452 images (up 5,958 images from 2,002,494 images) are online.
Thus in a 12-hours-period 1,602 new images were added, but in a 18-hours-period overall 5,958 new images, indicating an astonishing increase of 4,356 new images for the last six-hours-period.
Even if we disregard for a moment that it´s the weekend after July 4th and generally holiday season, a simple extrapolation based on the 1,602 image progression within 12 hours sums up to 96,120 new images in a 30-days period (assumed that the image acceptance rate and other factors will not significantly change).
It would take Fotolia 10,4 months to add one million new images to its pool and hit the 3 million images barrier again by the end of May 2008. But based on the mentioned 18-hours-period with 5,958 new images (equivalent to 238,320 new images/30-days period), the calculation yields 4,2 months and accordingly November 2007 for reaching 3 million images again.
Aside from this perspective examining the hourly changes, let us take a look what happened during the past five days.
On Tuesday this week Fotolia´s website said to have 1,966,277 images. Today, only five days later, 2,008,452 images are online: 42,175 new images in only five days, equivalent to 59,045 new images for a 7-days-period. Based on these numbers, Fotolia´s image portfolio would grow by about 253,050 new images in a 30-days period, and would hit the 3 million images barrier in only four month, again sometime in mid-November 2007.
Provided that quality is the guiding idea over there and less the overall number of images in the database, it is very hard to comprehend this sudden rise in Fotolia´s image portfolio during the above mentioned six-hours-period with 4,356 new images and during the last five days of this week with 42,175 new images.
Based on the projection of 59,405 new images during a 7-days-period, this would indicate that Fotolia is able to add 2.4 - 3.0 times more and hopefully valuable images to its portfolio than for example competitor Shutterstock which claims to add between 20,629 (Shutterstock website) and 25,000 (recent Shutterstock press release) new images per week.
Shutterstock´s database grew during the same 18 hours-period from 2,047,603 to 2,049,618 images (up 2,015 images) and in general less than 40% of all submitted images are accepted. But Jon Oringer was quoted in the April 2007 issue of Business2.0 to generate annual sales of more than $10 million, and Fotolia´s Oleg Tscheltzoff noted that Fotolia was south of $10 million.
StockXpert in comparison tends "to only accept about 12,000 images per week, but we could easily add 25,000 or more images per week" because they have "the desire to have the highest quality microstock imagery".
Either Fotolia is incredible successful in attracting microstock contributors, much more than its competitors, and thus the constant and marvellous influx of good and superior images allows Fotolia to keep a high image acceptance rate, or there must be another explanation I´m not aware of.
The next weeks and months will probably result in a neck-and-neck-race between Fotolia with 2,008 million images and Shutterstock with 2,049 million images: which microstock company will publicly accomplish the 2,1/2,5/3,0 million images milestone earlier than the other one?
Normally companies publish their recent achievements in a press release. Although Fotolia officially exceeded 2 million images again, there is yet no public announcement. Why not?
p.s.: Only two hours after publishing this article Fotolia´s website claimed to manage 2,010,575 images. If they add another 2,000 images within the next two hours -- somehow I expect that -- Fotolia overall would have added 10,000 images to its database in only 24 hours.
You do the math.
p.s. 2: All of a sudden, 10 hours later Fotolia´s image count went down to 2,010,558 images. So no new images, but instead 17 images were taken off the database.
Related:
- Fotolia: Another PR Speech (July 03, 2007)
- A week later after the relaunch: "What are the Impacts? Fotolia have lost customers" (June 24, 2007)
- Fotolia´s image pool loses 40% of its images (June 18, 2007)
- Fotolia tranfers 1.3 million images to swiss secure deposit box, FBI puts executives on Most Wanted list (Daryl Lang/PDN; June 18, 2007)
- Interview With Fotolia´s CEO Thibaud Elziere: "Microstock Sites Can Capture Up To 30% Of The Existing Market" (Nov. 28, 2005)
