And while the selection of images a query returns can occasionally be fairly painful in their posery - cf. It's all very of, by, and for the Internet: The site's images focus heavily on sit-comic poses, colorful cartoons, plates of food, ponderous abstractions, and cats. but there they are nonetheless, courtesy of photographers from around the world. The images Shutterstock serves up may not always be classy or fully clothed or even 100-percent relevant. (I did a search for "zeitgeist," just to see, and was rewarded with three packed pages' worth of images: clocks, scantily clad ladies carrying clocks, cartooned gentlemen carrying clocks, youths flashing peace signs, stylized clinking glasses, more cartoons, more clocks.) The site's contributors have covered almost everything, topic-wise - to the extent that, even with my occasionally zany image searches, it's extremely rare to have a query come up blank. To browse Shutterstock - as I often do, since we sometimes use their images here at The Atlantic - is to go on a weird and often wacky and occasionally totally wondrous journey through the visual zeitgeist. And, then, to fill it.Īnd fill it they do. There's very little "Hey, Orda, can you dress up a cat and pose it with some Benjamins and Beluga? Because that would be awesome." If there's a need for an image of that particular scene - or of, say, a cheeseburger, or a German shepherd laying in the grass with a laptop, or a shadowed man gazing contemplatively at the sea during a colorful sunset - it's pretty much up to the photographers to identify that need. In some cases, Braut says, Shutterstock's content team will do direct outreach to the site's top videographers, photographers, and illustrators "to help fill specific content needs." For the most part, though, Shutterstock contributors figure out for themselves what subscribers are looking for. The site is pretty much the Demand Media of imagery - and its revenues, for both the company and its community, depend on volume. Shutterstock is e-commerce with a twist, and its success depends on its contributors' ability to predict, and then provide, products that its subscribers will want to buy. But it's a community, of course, with an explicitly commercial purpose: Shutterstock pioneered the subscription approach to stock photo sales, allowing customers to download images in bulk rather than à la carte. The site, as the documentation for its upcoming IPO makes clear, is a web community in the manner of a Facebook or a Twitter or a Pinterest, with its value relying almost entirely on the enthusiasms of its contributors. This being the Internet, actually, there will probably be two or three.įor such occasions, when they arise, your best bet is to turn directly to an image service like Shutterstock. But there may well be one occasion when one will find oneself seeking an image of a cat in smart clothes with money and red caviar on a white background. There are not many occasions when one will find oneself seeking an image of a cat in smart clothes with money and red caviar on a white background.
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