Read all about it here;

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/shutterstock-to-announce-third-quarter-2012-earnings-release-on-november-15-2012-20121108-01788

Judging by my own sales it should make for interesting reading.

Sooooo....where is our raise?

thanks for sharing gostwyck!

Sooooo....where is our raise?

Buy some stock! I reckon Jon is keeping prices stable, operating for steady growth rather than immediate profits, and watching customers of IS, FT and DT come to SS. When the time is right he'll be able to increase prices and our commissions.

No point in "doing an iStock" and destroying a healthy business with mismanagement and greed.

Well, that doesn`t mean they have to raise their prices. I know you are a fanboy of SS, but if a company is making more Profit on the goods we supply I think a raise for us would be a good thing.

I'm a 'fan boy' of any well-managed microstock agency that delivers steady growth to my income over several years, doesn't cut commissions, doesn't do sneaky currency exchanges, doesn't lie to us and doesn't do dodgy claw-backs for supposed credit-card fraud. Hmmm *thinks really hard* __ that'll just be SS then.

I really want to see IS balance ....

$204-208 millions projection for 2013... that means one thing: increased sales and revenue ( even at the same commissions ).

Revenue per download = $    2.26

So assuming everyone gets 38 cents per download we're officially at 16% commission?

 

It's more like 30% or $.67 a download. That's about what I average. Still not great though.

$204-208 millions projection for 2013... that means one thing: increased sales and revenue ( even at the same commissions ).

Or just smaller slices of a larger pie. 

and are u saying that commision if good?

By the way, when will SS set a new lifetime earnings level over the 10 000$ ?
like 20 000, or 25000 or 30000 i don't know...
What do you think ?

These figures hardly show an industry in terminal decline as many suggest. Further polarisation maybe?

...

Quote from: click_click on November 16, 2012, 12:05

Revenue per download = $    2.26

So assuming everyone gets 38 cents per download we're officially at 16% commission?

 

It's more like 30% or $.67 a download. That's about what I average. Still not great though.

Quote from: nicku on November 16, 2012, 12:01

$204-208 millions projection for 2013... that means one thing: increased sales and revenue ( even at the same commissions ).

Or just smaller slices of a larger pie. 

So the last couple of months, my average has been around 80 cents per download, which is about 35%, and given the volume SS is able to generate, I think that's more than "not great". As long as the SS share is in part being spent on growing the business (versus just paying off private equity) I'm happy for them to keep a big chunk in return for all their work on flogging my stuff.

The CFO's statement said their cost of revenue was 38%, the bulk of which was contributor payments, so that seems to match up reasonably well with my numbers. They say they have 35K contributors, but I'm guessing that it's like other agencies where there's a huge pool of people who contribute and sell very little that account for the bulk of that number.

I read the transcript of the earnings call and there were several things that I liked in there.

They are increasing their efforts to reach large companies. Jon noted that 70% of Fortune 500 companies had at least one SS account, but spending with SS was a small fraction of those companies' total image spending. They want to increase that, and as long as that isn't done via discounting (elsewhere the COO talked about keeping the prices flat for subscriptions, which I think is code language for not discounting them) that seems like very good news for contributors.

"On the sales side, where we are just getting started penetrating agencies and large enterprises, we had our best quarter ever. On the agency side, we signed our third global master service agreement with a large agency network, and we grew adoption and usage across all of our agencies. On the enterprise side, we signed more deals than ever and we also expanded our selling footprint by adding new team members in the US and Europe, including our first sales office outside of headquarters."

I don't think I know what he's talking about with agency networks - is that where the growth in OD and single/other sales is coming from? Does anyone else have a clue what this is referring to.

As IS has closed the Berlin office, it's nice to see SS adding people in Europe.

Regarding the comment above that revenue only grew in line with growth in the colleciton, the CFO said that revenue for Q3 2012 was up 36% (39% in "constant currency terms"). The downloads in Q3 2012 were 18.7 million, up 26% from Q3 2011. In other words, revenue is growing faster than the growth in downloads or the library, which is good.

They've added staff (up 35% since the beginning of 2012) but 40% of the additions have been in their products and technology group "...folks that sort of build products that we deliver to customers..." according to the CFO. R&D spending is up too.

From the Q&A, the CFO made a comment about subscription growth versus on demand: "And what that has been generally is the subscription plan, pricing plan has grown a little bit more slowly than our overall growth, and on-demand growing a little bit faster, and that has continued to drive the mix shift, but we have seen consistent and steady growth from both overtime. We expect that to continue."

I'm happy to see more and more on demand as that is going to continue to drive up our returns. In response to another question about price increases, this was the answer: "As we have mentioned, we have held our pricing for our products flat over not only Q3, but really over the last few years, because our focus is really on increasing share. We are the significant price advantage to some of our competition and we believe that�s the right place for us to be right now. Long term, again, I think that we have talked about, there is probably opportunity, but we are very focused on increasing our penetration at this point."

This seems very much like amazon - amass a big market share and then you can focus on improving your returns. Clearly Getty will want to fight them on this, but I'm hoping that SS holds them off (given that I think that's my best chance of seeing some of the money; Getty has too many vultures to pay off).

On a question about the 2013 projections which beat the analyst's models, it included this lovely phrase "...how you balanced your 2013 outlook, given what�s been a little bit sort of a mixed bag from some of the agencies..." A little bit of a sort of a mix bag??? funny!


All in all a very positive report, IMO