14 DAY TRIAL // Renowned stock photography service Shutterstock has passed the 10-million mark of hosted images, and by doing so, strengthening its position as the number one service in the business. While the stock imagery market has been turbulent in this recent period with numerous top companies acquisitions, Shutterstock still remains the main business and success model for the entire market.
Providing licensed or royalty-free images and videos, the service is well-known for its very low subscription plan. That same plan brought the company's success, currently trying to be duplicated by one of its main competitors, Getty Images, in its most recent market release: Thinkstock.
Even if Pixmac is currently hosting about 150,000 more images than Shutterstock, Pixmac also distributes content from Dreamstime and Fotolia among its stock, so it will not be fair to put it in the same category with the other services.
Coming second to Shutterstock is Dreamstime, a Romanian-based microstock website with 7.75 million photos, followed by Fotolia with 7.45 million. Curiously, in December 2009, Fotolia officially announced in a blog post that it reached more than 8 million photos, while the website's official photo counter still displays to this day around 7.45 million hosted stock images.
After its great market debut in the early and mid-2000’s, iStockphoto-mania has dampened down and the service seems to have slowed its growth rate, now sizing up at only 6.3 million microstock photos.
The reason behind this recent historical accomplishment at Shutterstock is the late 2009 acquisition of BigStockPhoto, one of its biggest competitors, which brought in more than 4.4 million photos to Shutterstock's image showcase. BigStockPhoto also opened the door for Shutterstock to enter the credit-based stock image marketplace, still a new territory for the service that pioneered the account and image subscription plans.
Based on web traffic ranks, the hierarchy changes dramatically, with iStockphoto ranking in the top 250 (according to Alexa), followed by Fotolia in the top 500, Dreamstime in the Alexa top 750 and Shutterstock barely making the top 1,000. Pixmac isn't a contender at all, being ranked in the top 22,000 websites on the web; even a small service like StockXCHNG (400,000 images) being ranked above them by Alexa in the top 1,000.