How many photos and contributors?

How many photos and how man contributors are at iStock?


 

11 million, 150,000 something like that. guessing but from past threads, maybe less contributors.....

The microstockgroup has around 31 000 registered users. i would think that anyone serious in this industry will be registered and actively reading there.


At the Berlin Lypse, Simon Moran said there were 5500 istock exclusive artists.

I dont know how actually this informations are:


http://www.microstocktime.com/tool/stats/is/sales/

"Posted By Kerrick: 



"I dont know how actually this informations are:"


 


It is mentioned:


Latest update: June 6, 2012.

On August 4, 2011, KK Thompson said "110,000 contributors": http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=332782&page=1 


 

I currently have around 84000 contributors in my recently updated list. Those are all that have uploaded at least one file at all - dead accounts without files do not really count, although iStock would of course count them too to get higher numbers


Of these ~84000 accounts on January 7th 6234 were photo exclusive, I am not registering statistics for video etc . 1075 accounts have more than 25000 downloads which means we probably have a little over 1000 photo diamond contributors here.


Other than that we have a bit above 12.3 million files here and a stunning 131.7 million downloads. Hope that is enough statistic for now

that's impressive. Do you have a breakdown on downloads, exclusives vs. others?

Interesting! Is there a way to easily track how many exclusive illustrators there are and how many for each canister level? It would be interesting to see where I stand as an Exclusive Contributor, Gold canister.

Check again in a couple of weeks. 

Nice, thanks for all this interesting information.  12.3 files, that a BIG pie to be sliced.

In this chart, what does the rating represent?

the rating you have at iStock, remember the last update was on June 6th, 2012

Well I just checked some mean download values from May to November 2012 to get the percentages between different 'groups'. It looks like 54% of all downloads are collected by (photo) exclusives versus 46% by non exclusives. A little more in detail:


E Diamond: 37 %


E Gold: 11 %


E Silver: 4.5 %


N Diamond: 31 %


N Gold: 10 %


N Silver: 4 %


Within the 6 months of observation these values somewhat varied but unlike for the statistics of all contributors it has a much bigger effect if e.g. 3 diamonds cross a x10000 downloads barrier in the same week (I guess you know that we do not see exact numbers anymore). While this evens itself out with 84000 it does so significantly less with just 1000.


Currently I cannot recalculate these values to get them up to date because I made some changes in my application and the method is not yet updated. It will be more interesting to see how many exclusives return their crown in these times and if iStock can restore part of the lost sales volume.

Sorry, I do not have illustrators monitored since I only upload photos. The only way to track this would be to add reading of all illustrator levels from the profile pages, that would give at least an overview but no info on actual sales.

I think that 80% of all sales come from about 1000 contributors. It is interesting to see that sales are balanced between exclusives and independents.

Since there should be around 1000 photo diamonds (e and non-e) they would currently be responsible for about 70% of the sales so your guess should be close enough.


'Balanced' is relative here. We have ~6200 exclusives making 54% of the sales while ~78000 non exclusives make 46%. Of course part of this will be resulting from BM placement and exclusives uploading more files. But I am also pretty sure that many customers come here for exclusive images and not for just any images they could also buy (cheaper?) elsewhere. So every member quitting exclusivity will hurt iStock, I hope they know that too.

It looks to me that out of 78,000 non-exclusives, 70,000 are not selling anything.
Look at the two top levels, diamond and gold, which are responsible for over than 90% of sales. Fairly balanced, in my opinion, with just a slight advantage for exclusives.

Thank you for the interesting stats!