Data Licensing and the Contributor Fund

As our marketplace evolves with the needs of the content market, so does the breadth of our product offerings. In 2021 Shutterstock, Bigstock’s parent company, began exploring the potential of content beyond the traditional creative applications and licensing uses offered on Shutterstock.com and Bigstock.com. We discovered that creative content holds incredible value beyond its visual and design face value and this is when the concept of data licensing began to emerge on our platform.

Data licensing is an exciting opportunity to maximize the revenue-generating potential of creative assets, allowing customers seeking content for training computer vision systems to utilize our vast collection in a whole new way. Shutterstock announced the launch of Shutterstock.AI and computer vision products, also known as “datasets,” in July 2021. You can learn more about datasets here.

In July of 2023, we are excited to extend this new revenue opportunity to our Bigstock contributing artists as well! However, if you feel that this new way of licensing content is not the right option for your portfolio, you can manage your licensing permissions under your profile on the My Account page.

This is a new form of earnings for contributors beyond downloads and licensing of individual assets for commercial or editorial use. We are firmly committed to including our contributors as partners on this journey, and ensuring they receive a share of the proceeds from computer vision datasets when their content is used in the development of these technologies. Given the collective nature of this product, we developed a revenue share compensation model.

Although inclusion in datasets is not reflected as other individual downloads in the Image Earnings summary, like earnings from other eCommerce products, Shutterstock maintains an internal database of all assets used in all datasets that have been created since the launch of this product, so we can compensate our contributors accordingly. Contributors will receive a share of the entire contract value paid by customers licensing datasets. The share individual contributors receive will be proportionate to the volume of their content and metadata that is included in the purchased datasets. Contributors will earn a 20% average corporate royalty rate of revenue received by Shutterstock for data licenses.

Earnings from datasets are pooled in a collective fund and will be distributed periodically as the fund accumulates significant revenue for distribution. If you have generated earnings from the fund, you will see those reflected on the Image Earnings page as “Contributor Fund”.