There are not many occasions when one will find oneself seeking an image of a cat in smart clothes with money and red caviar on a white background. But there may well be one occasion when one will find oneself seeking an image of a cat in smart clothes with money and red caviar on a white background. This being the Internet, actually, there will probably be two or three.
For such occasions, when they arise, your best bet is to turn directly to an image service like Shutterstock. The site, as the documentation for its upcoming IPO makes clear, is a web community in the manner of a Facebook or a Twitter or a Pinterest, with its value relying almost entirely on the enthusiasms of its contributors. But it's a community, of course, with an explicitly commercial purpose: Shutterstock pioneered the subscription approach to stock photo sales, allowing customers to download images in bulk rather than à la carte. Shutterstock is e-commerce with a twist, and its success depends on its contributors' ability to predict, and then provide, products that its subscribers will want to buy. The site is pretty much the Demand Media of imagery -- and its revenues, for both the company and its community, depend on volume.
Shutterstock launched in 2003 and has grown steadily since then, bolstered by the explosion of web publishing. On the Internet, there is always text in need of decoration -- and the site now offers a library of 19 million images to do that decorating. (Per Alexa's somewhat reliable demographic stats, Shutterstock's site visitors are disproportionately women -- women who live in the U.S., who browse the site from work, who don't have children, and who do have Master's degrees. Which is to say, probably, they're members of the media.)
As its own kind of inside-out media organization, Shutterstock leverages the same kind of market-prediction strategy that Demand does ... but it does that without Demand's infamous algorithms. Instead, says Scott Braut, Shutterstock's VP of content, it provides its contributors with tools like keyword trends and popular searches so they "can find out what people are looking for and when." The site also hosts multiple forums intended to guide people through the photo submission process -- and that process, its contributors have told me, is exceptionally user-friendly compared to other microstock photo sites.
To Register as a Contributor on Shutterstock, click here
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