Shutterstock overtakes iStockphoto in Alexa rankings
In the last week of June 2012, perennial #2 Shutterstock finally overtook rival iStockphoto in Alexa traffic rank to become the most popular microstock website.
The race has been on for many years. iStockphoto (now owned by Getty Images) has led since its inception in May 2000, but its traffic peaked in 2010 and has been dropping slightly for the past two years. Meanwhile, Shutterstock(founded in 2003 and now looking to go public) has been steadily growing in popularity since 2008. The crossover in Alexa Rank occurred in the last week of June 2012.
“Alexa Traffic Rank is an estimate of a website’s popularity. The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the past 3 months […with the] most popular site ranked as #1.”
— Alexa.com
Latest Rank
Here are the ranks as of now, when you accessed this page:
| Shutterstock | |
| iStockphoto |
20 Million Images
In related news, around the same time, on June 21, 2012, Shutterstock announced that it had surpassed 20 million images in its collection. They are the first agency to do so — Fotolia may be next.
Microstock Top 40
For more information, check out my list of the Microstock Top 40 most popular sites to sell your photos online.
Source: My Stock Photography. Image from Alexa.com, August 1 2012.
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