Why exclusivity is not an option for a stock photographer
Quoting from a post by Shutterstock founder John Oringer on his blog: Shutterstock went through many stages of development before becoming today's company. I started with 30,000 of my own photos, and now we offer 20 million images, 35,000 active contributors, and over 550,000 buyers. Today, Shutterstock is the stock content leader, selling more than two images per second. The image market that we have created is moving in several directions. And over the past nine years, we have learned a lot about both buyers and sellers of content. I get the question very often from buyers, sellers, investors and the press: "why don't you create an exclusivity program for Shutterstock creators?". All our main competitors have such offers, but not us. For us, the answer is obvious. However, this is completely incomprehensible to those who are not brewed in this business. The bottom line is that if you work with microstock agencies, exclusivity is not beneficial to you in the first pl