Whois & Analysis for shutterstock.com

Shutterstock is an American stock photography, stock footage, stock music, and editing tools provider headquartered in New York City.

Founded in 2003 by programmer and photographer Jon Oringer, Shutterstock maintains a library of around 90 million royalty-free stock photos, vector graphics, and illustrations, with around 4 million video clips and music tracks available for licensing.

Originally a subscription site only, Shutterstock expanded beyond subscriptions into a la carte pricing in 2008, and has been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2012.

Since its founding Shutterstock has acquired a handful of other companies, starting with Bigstock in 2009 and followed by digital asset management software provider WebDAM in 2014.

After acquiring Rex Features and PremiumBeat in 2015, Shutterstock recently announced a partnership with the Associated Press.

It also has licensing deals with companies such as Penske Media Corporation.

The company had over 100,000 contributors as of March 2016, with an "active customer base of 1.4 million people in 150 countries.".

Royalty-free, or RF, refers to the right to use copyright material or intellectual property without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use or per volume sold, or some time period of use or sales.

Stock photography is the supply of photographs, which are often licensed for specific uses.

The stock photo industry, which began to gain hold in the 1920s, has established models including traditional macrostock photography, midstock photography, and microstock photography.

Conventional stock agencies charge from several hundred to several thousand American dollars per image, while microstock photography may sell for around USD 25 cents.

Professional stock photographers traditionally place their images with one or more stock agencies on a contractual basis, while stock agencies may accept the high-quality photos of amateur photographers through online submission.

Vector graphics is the use of polygons to represent images in computer graphics.

Vector graphics are based on vectors, which lead through locations called control points or nodes.

Each of these points has a definite position on the x- and y-axes of the work plane and determines the direction of the path; further, each path may be assigned various attributes, including such values as stroke color, shape, curve, thickness, and fill.

A photograph or photo is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic medium such as a CCD or a CMOS chip.

Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of what the human eye would see.

The process and practice of creating photographs is called photography.

The word "photograph" was coined in 1839 by Sir John Herschel and is based on the Greek φῶς (phos), meaning "light", and γραφή (graphê), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light".