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Company: Shutterstock, Inc., New York, NY
Company Description: Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE: SSTK), is a leading global provider of high-quality licensed photographs, vectors, illustrations and videos to businesses, marketing agencies and media organizations around the world. Working with its growing community of over 40,000 contributors, Shutterstock adds tens of thousands of images each week, and currently has more than 30 million images available.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Award for Innovation in Sales

Nomination Title: Shutterstock

Tell the story about your organization's innovations in sales or business development since the beginning of July 2012 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Shutterstock is a leading global provider of high-quality licensed photographs, vectors, illustrations and videos to businesses, marketing agencies and media organizations around the world.

Shutterstock took on its much larger competitors with better technology, innovative products offerings, strategic partnerships, and lower prices. It also won over big users, such as publishers and ad agencies, with subscription plans to control costs, giving the company a stable source of revenue.

Shutterstock's digital library has grown to 30 million photographs, and it sells three photos each second at an average of $2.33 per photo. Vetted contributors constantly send in photos and receive 30% of the sale price when their photos are purchased.

New Products

• In 2013, Shutterstock Launched Offset, a New Marketplace for Extraordinary, Royalty-Free imagery. Offset contains images from established artists, including work National Geographic, and Cavan Images.

• Shutterstock also Introduced Spectrum, new image discovery tool created in-house, indexes histogram data to yield search results by color.

• Shutterstock invested in the emerging content of video footage, becoming among the fastest growing segments of the business. The video library has doubled over the past year to more than 1.3 million video clips.

• Also with videos, Shutterstock launched Skillfeed, an online marketplace for learning offering a diverse collection of credible, curated video courses through a simple, affordable subscription plan. Skillfeed features more than 10,000 videos from over 100 instructors.

• Shutterstock also launched an Android Mobile App to following the release of its award-winning iOS app.

Partnerships

• In 2013, Shutterstock partnered with Facebook to offer over 1 million active Facebook advertisers access to Shutterstock images. Not only does this collaboration help expand their reach and awareness among advertisers, it also helps expand the market for commercial imagery.

• Shutterstock subsidiary Bigstock Partnered with Constant Contact to Provide Small Businesses Access to Millions of High-Quality Photos and Illustrations

Global penetration.

• Shutterstock is fast becoming a local player in key territories around the world. In 2012, 72% of Shutterstock sales came from outside the U.S., and the company is now translating its website into 20 languages. In 2013, Shutterstock opened its first international office in London and added Berlin as it’s the regional hub in Europe.

• Shutterstock is also investing in a larger and more global enterprise sales team. Direct sales to enterprises continues to be one of the fastest growing parts of Shutterstock’s business, doubling year-over-year across agencies, publishers, media companies, large corporations, both the number and size of deals increased.

RESULTS

Shutterstock continues to attract customers and contributors to its global marketplace at a record pace. Shutterstock has a whopping 750,000 customers in over 150 countries around the world. Existing customers were more active than ever before licensing 35% more images than in 2012.

The company’s revenue last year increased 41 percent. Downloads grew 35% year-over-year reaching a record 25.4 million in the third quarter of 2013. Revenue per download increased 4% increase over 2012.

Going Forward

With new innovative products and services, new partnerships, new markets and a dedicated sales team, Shutterstock is in a unique position to expand and capture a larger portion of this $6 billion market for commercial imagery and broaden their potential as a business.

Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated sales organization:

Jon Oringer founded Shutterstock in 2003 with thousands of his own digital photographs. A serial entrepreneur, he recognized the need for licensable images at an affordable cost and created the first global subscription image marketplace. Jon built the original site from the ground up, and still enjoys writing code. He holds an MS in Computer Science from Columbia and a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from Stony Brook.

A New Yorker to the core, Jon resides in the West Village, is a certified commercial helicopter pilot, and enjoys shooting film with his Mamiya 7II camera.