Congrats to my former partner Bruce Livingstone and the rest of the team at iStockphoto for shooting out the lights. As Bruce mentioned on iStockphoto.com yesterday, the numbers are big across the board, including the amount paid to photographers. The scary thing is, there’s still more room to grow. Did I mention we sold iStockphoto to Getty for $50 million 2 years ago? sigh . . .
For the first time ever, we’re breaking our long-standing silence on the numbers and giving you a few facts and figures. There is one number that makes us most proud, and it’s notthe $71.9 million in revenue we generated last year (although that is really, really exciting). The amazing thing is that we paid out $20.9 million to contributors last year. That’s one h*ck of a lot of money, and doesn’t include the $110,000 we gave out on Punctum Day. We are now selling an image every 1.4 seconds through this industry changing marketplace. It even gives us pause every time we look at these stats.
That our revenue and payouts have eclipsed those of many traditional stock photography companies confirms that microstock is a viable and profitable business model for contributors and clients. We wanted to share the sheer scale of how viable and profitable we’ve all become together. The supercharged growth we had in 2007 was orchestrated by an astounding management team that helped make iStockphoto the envy of the industry. That same iStock/Getty team is sticking together and adding some new faces to help execute on all the new super-wicked stuff we have coming this year.
Patrick Lor 