When a user signs up for Skillfeed, they get unlimited access to thousands of video courses and creative and technical skills, all as a part of one inexpensive monthly subscription. Instructors from around the world can apply to have their course from Skillfeed and earn money based on how much their courses are viewed.
— Jon Oringer
Offset is helping to expand our relationship with large enterprises and serve a broader set of imaging.
As I saw more and more people buying the images that were happy buyers, and people selling the images that were happy with how the market was pricing them, I started to get the sense this could be the go-to place for businesses to get the images they need.
We look for the scrappy entrepreneur: the kind of person who will get things done without looking to spend money right away.
Anyone can contribute images, and we sell them to designers and agencies all over the world.
It's typical for video customers to often use licensed music - whether a soundtrack, background music, or sound effects - to complement their video projects.
Editorial imagery licensing includes celebrity, entertainment, sports, and news images that capture what is happening in the world around us.
Just as we are enhancing the customer side of our marketplace, we are also looking for ways to increase our contributor expense.
By investing in diverse asset types from SD video to HD video to 4K video, we can satisfy the video needs of a wide array of users.
While the scale of our library is certainly attractive to our users, equally important is the quality of the content we provide and our state-of-the-art processing operation that vets every single piece of content that's submitted to ensure only the most suitable content is included.
To ensure we are meeting the demands of existing customers while also attracting new users, we remain focused on building cutting-edge technology and introducing new and innovative product offerings.
Try to rally up as many people as you can with as much information as you can to try to get it to appear in front of the right people in the organization who are the decision-makers to greenlight the project.
It turned out it was really easy to create commercial stock footage.
Any business that is trying to sell something should be willing to spend a couple dollars for a stock photo to not have ads in it and not distract the user from using the product they're trying to sell.
Rex has photographers around the world - it's a higher touch business: there are a lot of relationships involved. If you throw an event, there are certain photographers you've worked with before and you want there.
I met with several public company CEOs to learn about their experiences of going public and listened to as many earnings calls as I possibly could.
We realized we had high-volume marketplace as a platform. Anyone can come in and buy with a subscription.
At Shutterstock, we've been offering tutorials to customers and contributors on our blog for many years. Our audience already viewed us as thought leaders on the latest digital and creative skills; we felt it so natural for us to launch Skillfeed, which is an online marketplace for professional learning.
The best thing is to go public only when you're absolutely sure that's the right move for the company. And in order to make sure that is the case, you need to have as much control over the company as possible, which means not giving up control early on.
I think, as an entrepreneur, you have to see the unlimited amount of potential but concentrate on your day and just keep building.
There is a lack of talent in technology, and we need to be encouraging kids in school to learn how to code. We need to encourage computer science as a major. We need to encourage entrepreneurism.
I needed to make the buyer happy: I needed to provide a price point and sort of a model that was attractive to them. But I also needed to make the contributor happy.
In 2013, we opened our first international office in London and established a European hub in Berlin.
We believe PremiumBeat will accelerate our mission to make licensable music accessible to every creator.
Equally important to having the right content is providing the proper tools for the users so they can quickly find the images and videos they need.
We recognized early on that media consumption was evolving and customers were looking for moving images to include as part of their advertising campaigns, website designs and corporate presentations.
On average, an e-commerce client who evolves into a premier enterprise client increases their annual spend by 10 times in that first year.
We continually hear from our engaged customer base that Shutterstock's content is a true differentiator, given not only the size of the library but also the quality and diversity of the images we offer.
Was I going to start companies outside of Shutterstock or inside? Going public kind of meant I was going to start them inside, and I kind of thought this through and decided that if I was going to do that, I was going to continue to operate Shutterstock like it was an incubator of startups.
I was trying to create products to complement the pop-up blocker. All these people were giving me their credit cards. I figured I could sell them something else.
We sell to businesses who sell other stuff, so we're just going to concentrate on doing that.
Shutterstock has the tech ethos. Rex has the relationships, packaging, and merchandising know-how.
There aren't enough people out there that are becoming experts in technology as technology moves.
Each time I went to create my website, I needed imagery. It was complicated to get, the process was expensive, I had to negotiate rights. I knew there had to be a better way.
Offset and Skillfeed are examples of products launched in 2013 that have expanded our opportunity with both large enterprises and across new content types.
I would still rather be in Silicon Alley. I like the West Coast also, but it's sort of fragmented. You have companies in downtown San Francisco, companies in Mountain View, and people are driving between them all. It's kind of nice in New York to just jump in a cab and reach another company so easily.
I think that initial independence is very important; that's what being an entrepreneur is all about.
I found it very helpful not to do the venture round. Instead, I started with very little money, a few thousand dollars, and I did every job myself. I was the first photographer. I was the first customer service rep. I was the first online marketing person.
I opened up Shutterstock to the whole world. I created a contributor community that anyone could give stock photography a shot.
Shutterstock has evolved from an image-based marketplace for small businesses to a much broader platform, with a large and expanding addressable market opportunity.
We significantly increased our global presence in 2014. During the year, we expanded the number of languages in which we serve customers to a total of 20.
Shutterstock's ability to cultivate a healthy and expanding marketplace for both customers and contributors remains a key competitive advantage and a crucial component of our sustained growth.
Evolution has been the key tenet of success over the past 13 years, and we have transformed from a single subscription e-commerce image business into a company with a diversified portfolio of content offerings, servicing the needs of businesses of all types and sizes globally.
The growing demand for content across our platform delivers bigger payouts to our contributor base and encourages them to upload fresh content to Shutterstock, further facilitating the network effect of our business.
We have a lot of customers in Japan, but they don't quite get the local content that they always need, so we want to encourage all of our product teams to start thinking globally.
As we continue to grow, the question is, how do you keep the company as innovative as it was 15 employees ago?
To make a computer do something that would take a human a long period of time was always interesting.
Rex is 60 years old with 13 million images and 10 million in archive. It's the first time we've had a historic archive to work with, which is super interesting.
When I started Shutterstock, I tried to get people access to big events. It's very hard to keep up, to publish them quick, and to get the right photographers.
If people want to code, and they want to be entrepreneurs, there's opportunities for them to do that.
