The brands will remain separate and the deal will have little immediate impact on customers and contributors, says Shutterstock CEO Jon Oringer.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Mergers are unusual in the crowded microstock space, where about six larger brands and over a dozen smaller ones have been courting online image buyers for several years.
Shutterstock has differentiated itself by offering subscription pricing, which appeals to high-volume customers. BigStockPhoto uses a more common pricing structure of selling credits, which customers redeem for individual image licenses.
Oringer says Shutterstock was looking for a way to reach lower-volume buyers with a credit-based service. “We were in a position where we could either build one or buy one,” he says.
Most other major microstock brands offer subscription and credit pricing, including Dreamstime, Fotolia, and Getty Images’s two sites, iStockPhoto and StockXpert. Getty’s Photos.com is another value-priced subscription stock service.
All of the microstock brands are closely held, but iStockphoto is thought to be the market leader by a wide margin, with a revenue forecast of $200 million this year.
Shutterstock is based in New York City and employed about 50 as of this spring, when the company moved to an expanded office. BigStockPhoto, founded in 2004 by Tim Donahue and Dawn Donahue, is based in Davis, California and has a staff of about 5. Both sites also have thousands of contributing photographers and artists, plus a handful of paid reviewers who screen photo submissions for quality.
