Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge
143 comments
·January 7, 2025righthand
paxys
You can't innovate your way out of basic economics. The value of a photograph has continued to decline year after year to the point where it is now ~$0. The licensing revenue pie is getting smaller and smaller, and so companies in the space have been shrinking and consolidating to adapt to it. That's all there is to it.
probably_wrong
I'd argue that the value of a photograph is not $0. The problem is rather that its actual value is lower than the $200 that Getty wants for a 3MP picture of a hamburger.
I've been in projects where we cleared the rights for every picture, and it's always the same: either we blow the budget on two pictures with strong usage restrictions or we replace them all with CC alternatives.
Perhaps photographs need their Steam moment.
paulddraper
Do you believe if their prices were half, they would sell twice as many?
ChrisNorstrom
TLDR; Just use http://www.unsplash.com for free professional photos.
100% agree. Years ago I signed up for Getty images (royality based) back when they were competing with Fotolia (royalty free) before they were bought by Adobe, and actually clicked through the shopping cart to see how much it would be to license a picture of some nice autumn leaves for a billboard or a calendar. It was an insane amount in the hundreds of dollars, and it was time limited, and only for a limited run (if you used them for example, a calendar), the usage rights were insane. And if you wanted the full resolution it was something like $1,000+ dollars. Our minds were boggled. We honestly legitamately thought Getty images was some kind of money laundering operation. It was cheaper to hire a photographer to get the pictures you want, rather than license them from Getty.
Yes they have some nice rare photographs of political events (wars, earthquake response, important cultural news photos) but they are insane for thinking their entire catalog is deserving of royalties and time/run limitations. The only thing Getty did was convince me that copyright needs to be heavily reformed. (The photographer isn't paying royalties to all the people who made the objects in the photo, yet they're asking for royalities just for taking the photo)
righthand
Shutterstock doesn’t sell digital assets, they sell the license to use assets. The value of a stock photograph for marketing has decreased YoY, but the value of the license to use that photograph has only gone up. The consolidation is a trick they play on shareholders to convince them they are gaining value through assets, even though the value of assets is $0.
That is why a good portion of their earnings calls are about miscellaneous vague initiatives defined as an acronym and how much they saved on operating capital through acquisitions and layoffs.
The only way to increase the value of a license is with exclusivity. In which case the only remaining innovation is to direct the value back to the contributor. Which in turn would shrink the company.
harrall
Why do they need innovation? They just have a product that works, like a company that makes nails. Is there much for a nail company to innovate all the time?
It’s a boring job that has been long figured out.
Sure, they can diversify by adding other services, just like how a nail company could start making screws, but that’s not really innovation… that’s just doing something else altogether. Should Getty diversify? Maybe, but it would be more for their own survival than actually making their core product better.
If you are looking for a job that has innovation, you apply in an industry that still has places to go. You can’t work for a nail-making company and then complain that they aren’t re-inventing the world.
eviks
> Is there much for a nail company to innovate all the time?
Of course there is, you can innovate to use less metal maintaining quality (see aluminum cans as an example of this in a similarly boring tech with "no innovation potential")
In services there is an even bigger potential to create more value
ActionHank
So basically Getty Image layoffs announced today?
righthand
Effective in 3-9 months. Today is about pretending the company is growing with employees.
denysvitali
They also make money by chasing down people who use their images without paying a license (fair) by "extortion".
Once my co-founder used an image downloaded from Google (bad!) for the company website, GettyImages noticed that and threatened our company to legal actions (C&D) unless we pay the price of the license for the stock image, which magically became "premium" (or whatever their top tier is) for the occasion.
They're for sure right in making you pay in case you're illegitimately using their images without a license (totally fair IMHO), but the way they do it is very shady.
LiquidPolymer
Hi. You are talking about me. I'm involved in multiple infringement settlements and lawsuits every year. Perhaps I should point out that I have spent thousands of my own dollars, and hundreds of hours photographing subjects that are rarely seen much less captured with a camera. My images are licensed hundreds of times every month. They are also frequently stolen. If you steal one of my images you are going to get a demand letter. The price will be far higher than any licensing fee. This is because my images are registered with the copyright office at the Library of Congress which entitles me to seek punitive damages.
The writing has been on the wall for decades. Images are losing value because millions upon millions are created every hour of every day. However, some of those images are remarkable and unique. People can make a lot of money if you happen to be the copyright holder of these images.
An example I like to give is the photographs Gary Rosenquist captured of Mt. St. Helens exploding and the side of the mountain sliding away. Nobody else captured this sequence. Not even close. These images make substantial licensing fees to this day.
I've long been fascinated by the fact that a camera can capture subjects the human eye cannot properly perceive. It just so happens that this obsession has led me to create images that are hard to imitate. I feel no guilt in charging fees for my images. I feel no guilt about pursuing people who have stolen my images for their own projects.
If you are photographing bald eagles with an American flag in the background or frosty fall leaves artfully arranged on the ground - I agree with the gist of this thread - these images are worth practically nothing. But this not universally true for all images.
rad_gruchalski
How are they suppose to do that without coming across shady?
denysvitali
The shady part is the part where the price of the image magically increases (on their website) as soon as they detect a copyright infringement, so that they can get even more money from you.
All in all, as stated in the original comment, I believe it's in their right to do so (because the copyright infringement happened), but they take advantage of this in a shady / scammy way
Gud
Sorry I don’t understand, how are they the bad guy in your scenario?
Presumably an online business should follow copyright law?
denysvitali
Yes, they're not the bad guys for making people respect their copyright (there have also been cases where Getty re-licensed public domain images and threatened people in similar ways, but that's a different matter).
Assuming they're the legitimate copyright holders, the shady part is increasing the price of the image on their website to make you pay more than what you should as soon as they notice the infringement - and threatening legal actions if you don't pay the image price
blahyawnblah
They're not saying they're the bad guys
bufferoverflow
Your first sentence is self-contradictory. They are making money from their stock photos/images/videos. By charging fees for usage.
dpflan
Can you elaborate what is needed to compete and displace?
righthand
- a stock photography collection to make your site seem full of content
- organize the labor to shoot photography and video around editorial content and empower them to sell their own assets with tooling
- as an indexer you only take a 30% which is much lower than the aggressive everyone loses shutterstock-getty cut
———
Personally I imagine a decentralized approach where contributors host the content or purchase hosting space from the indexer. The indexer just provides a search platform. Transparent costs will keep people at your doorstep and maintain exclusivity.
It is important to understand that Shutterstock does not sell assets, they sell the licenses to use the assets.
mrcwinn
This is misguided.
First, you can't "organize labor" to take an iconic photo of a shuttle landing that happened 30 years ago. That is, there is enormous value in their existing library.
Second, decentralized photography is called Instagram, yet those photos aren't worth anything. Instagram has no interest in licensing them. Instead, they monetize around the photo (engagement) and not the photo itself. The real value has been in the content produced by professional photojournalists.
Whether Getty/Shutterstock is a good business is a different topic. They've been around for a long time, despite your claim they are "easily disrupted." You both underestimate the value of indexing (distribution) and mislabel them as being merely an indexer (they protect rights, organize deals, bundle and package, centralize relationships, to name a few).
SilasX
>Shutterstock and Getty do not make money from their stock photography catalog, most of their revenue comes from maintaining exclusive contracts for editorial content (news photos, videos, etc) and selling licenses to those assets.
How are you not counting that as "making money from their stock photography catalog"?
righthand
If you remove the editorial arm, revenue would crater from only selling generalized stock photography.
SilasX
Okay then there are better ways to phrase that distinction, because what you've described is still "licensing stock photography". The editorial arm is just a means by which they license.
rvz
> There is no innovation at the company, just a set of long time engineers and their niche microservice and a rotating door of C-suite looking to collect a bonus from operating capital from layoffs. I do not see anything that actually benefits them being a publicly traded corporation or reasons they deliver actual shareholder value, but they soldier on.
They don't care.
> I do not see anything that actually benefits them being a publicly traded corporation or reasons they deliver actual shareholder value, but they soldier on.
Well they should have already known that OpenAI (and others) have license agreements directly from Shutterstock to train AI models such as DALL-E 3 (or DALL-E 4) and that is of interest to Getty to own the rights to the images.
Stability AI has close to no choice but to settle their lawsuit against them.
cloudking
Anecdotal, but I haven't bought a stock image since Stable Diffusion was released.
Edit: with Flux, you can't even tell the difference: https://blackforestlabs.ai/
Etheryte
There are plenty of businesses that think the same way and every time I see an ad with an image that's clearly AI-generated I steer clear of it. It looks cheap, hits the uncanny valley and is often a good sign of lowest effort possible.
CommieBobDole
While I also have a distaste for AI stock photos, their crappiness just highlights the fact that a stock photo already meant "This article does not need a picture to communicate anything, but I know that articles with a picture perform better than articles without, so I will exert the least possible effort and expense to add a picture to this article".
It's just that now there's an even cheaper way to do that.
vidarh
Survivor bias. In that, you're reacting only to the images you assume are AI. It could be you're really good at spotting them, or they're really bad. But it could also be you spot a tiny proportion, or even misidentify real images as AI. Without knowing the real rate, it tells us nothing about whether picking AI images over stock images is a good tradeoff or not.
ghaff
As someone who purchased stock images via our content team there were a ton of really schlocky stock images 10+ years ago and probably longer that I might be inclined to dismiss as AI-generated today.
devin
Oh, please. I've generated many, many images. They are not hard to spot.
infecto
I am in the same boat, photos are here to stay at least in the short to medium term. It will most definitely change as we get better and better models that become photo realistic. I keep seeing the same themed AI generated images in tech blogs and it is tiresome, its just like how meme images were constantly used in writeups a decade ago.
karmasimida
Photo ofc will not be replaced
Photo is an image but also a record. The fact something really did exist and captured is probably more valuable than ever.
So wedding/event photographer really don’t have to worry about lose their job to AI
But in places where photo, as an image just to express abstract idea, without concerning where and when it happened, then that part of value goes to AI already
vintermann
Well I'm grateful for it. Because now corporate stock photos remind me of AI images, and I can properly appreciate that those are signs of low effort junk too.
whywhywhywhy
Stock photos always looked cheap anyway.
Both low talent AI use and stock photos have their own look about them and neither is premium.
Ensorceled
"I can't afford real images of real people and can't tell these images are shit, but you can rest assured that I didn't take any short cuts on the product!"
vintermann
Real images of real people, although slightly unrealistically racially diverse and very unrealistically attractive, and absolutely not working for the company they're standing around a laptop for... is that really any better? Look at us, we're so serious we can licence shutterstock garbage?
cloudking
I can afford them, I just don't need to anymore. My use cases for stock photos are websites, marketing, landing pages etc. The SOTA image models are sufficient for my use cases and my customers don't care. Infact, they are happy with the quality of AI generated stock photos and appreciate the fast turnaround and lower cost.
aloisdg
Until when?
null
probably_wrong
The "ee" in "Coffee" is a different shape, the tie of the no-longer-in-a-suit guy changes style midway and the pockets of the woman for the depth example don't match.
I'll agree that people who don't care about sewing and calligraphy probably won't notice, but there's a difference between "you can't even tell" and "you can't even tell as long as you don't care too much about the result".
RogerL
And that is true for the foreseeable future, which unfortunately, if my math is correct, is around 17 hours.
In 2 (time units) we'll be doing computer analysis of lens distortion or something to try to suss out the AI. At which point it won't matter for the stock image use case, of course it matters for legal matters and such. And then in 1-2 more units we're going to need public/private key signing implemented in 'cameras of record', because detection will be practically, if not actually impossible.
Is that 'unit' days or years? Dunno, but I bet it is a lot closer to the former.
bambax
I'm a small-time Shutterstock contributor and my best sellers are all news-style images from actual events. (For example, when announcing a future conference, a publication often likes to illustrate the article with images from the previous iteration). While possible, those are more difficult to reproduce with AI.
Shutterstock used to have a program called "Red Carpet" where they endorsed independent photographers to help us get in to events as press. Then like all good things, it was shut down, no explanation given. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ghaff
An organization whose events I attend regularly has a photographer, who I assume is not on staff but seems to be their regular photographer, and they use a lot of their work to populate upcoming conferences and the like.
mplewis
If you think people can't tell when you've cheaped out on them, you're the sucker.
Ekaros
No anti-trust here? Seems like their market share might be too unreasonable to me.
DannyBee
In the US this would not be enough - at a minimum, you'd have to show actual harm, like, for example, showing it has caused (or is very very likely to cause) higher prices for folks.
I don't know enough about stock images to say for sure, but a cursory glance suggests Getty has not been raising prices outside of the norm over time.
It would be a very hard case to win without a bunch of unfavorable data.
martin_a
I think Getty, Shutterstock and Adobe Stock are _the_ stock image agencies. If two of them merge, wouldn't that be enough for a "market dominating position" and therefore enough to get somebody involved?
mikeyouse
The FTC is a political organization led by political appointees who mirror the politics of those who appoint them.. I think 2 years ago this would’ve attracted regulatory scrutiny, I don’t think it will as of Jan 20th.
bediger4000
> at a minimum, you'd have to show actual harm, like, for example, showing it has caused (or is very very likely to cause) higher prices for folks.
I'm sure that's the legal criteria, but why do I get a feeling of "time to move along" when I use a product of one of the merged companies? Every telecom merger, every food or book publisher merger, every aerospace company merger, has passed the review you state, but very shortly products are no longer made, services are ramped down, quality degrades.
As an employee, I've been through mergers as well, the merged company always sucks more than the original. Sometimes for trivial reasons (CXOs chose the worse of the two time card systems), sometimes for a multitude of reasons.
As a consumer and worker, I have acquired a reflexive suspicion and dislike of mergers.
null
SilasX
I know it's not entirely in keeping with the spirit of this site, but there's a part of me that really wants to snark,
"Oh no! We might no longer have meaningful competition for random-ass, dumbed-down, emotionally manipulative pictures to add to news articles! So next time you read an ad-bloated article about prices going up, they might not be able to afford to include a picture of an average Jane pushing a shopping cart! Truly, a loss to us all!"
Edit: Maddox's classic take on annoyance with stock images:
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=stock_photos
paxys
Shares of Getty and Shutterstock have been down 36% and 22% respectively in the last year, in a market that went up by 25% in the same period. It is obvious that neither company has a sustainable business model anymore. Whether they can combine and turn things around though remains to be seen.
ChrisMarshallNY
I've been a Shutterstock member for years (not a big user, but I always like to make sure my blog posting images are legit, and SS has been good for that).
Hope that it doesn't change much for me.
Otherwise, I'm sure it will be OK.
Can't help but feel that this is a response to some of the AI image generation stuff.
schappim
Just think of all the re-watermarking that will have to take place!
bambax
I've been a (small time) Shutterstock contributor for over 10 years. You'd think they'd send a mail to the people producing the images to announce something like this, instead of waiting for them learning about it in the press.
You'd be wrong.
paxys
They are both public companies. They cannot tell you the news privately before a broad announcement.
righthand
The company isn’t organized to do that. It’s a handful of 40 year olds holding a carrot on a stick in front of 20-30 year olds. The leadership doesn’t actually direct any product development so it’s just meetings and chaos.
anonstock
If it makes you feel any better most employees learned about it in the press as well.
Like sibling commenter paxys says public companies have to avoid any insider trading/market manipulation entanglements.
sexy_seedbox
Feels like Getty has acquired all their big competitors.
TMWNN
Is this a defensive move, against AI taking over the stock image market?
elpocko
Both of them already provide AI image generation themselves.
Raed667
if you're going to get scraped anyway, might as well get paid
animuchan
Not sure it'll help against AI eventually taking over. They can't compete on price, and the quality ceiling for "generic corporate announcement picture of diverse people smiling" is very reachable for the current gen AI.
dylan604
Just don't show the hands of those people
Ekaros
I would also consider consolidation as move to cut costs. If there is no more growth or it is taken by AI, that is the next step to get line go up.
blitzar
The defensive move here is the sellers cashing out while they still have a decent valuation and taking their money elsewhere.
vintermann
Probably the plan is to sue big, and convince investors that's going to work.
oldgregg
Somebody should just scrape all the most popular images from getty then setup a pipeline to regenerate them with flux/controlnet/loras. Charge $10/mo for unlimited licensing or find ancillary way to generate revenue. If most of revenue comes from editorial images start there-- most people won't even care if it's a bit off.
nojvek
Ghutterstock has plenty of $$$ to make a lawsuit. If the image catalog is close enough, that is a copyright violation.
null
ThinkBeat
I have always held Getty at a much higher level than Shutterstock. I find this a bit sad.
pbhjpbhj
Does this relate to the 'copyright for ML training' lawsuits at all? Is the merged consent better able to fight, better able to argue for steeper compensation/remuneration?
hardwaresofton
The axis of stock photography
Shutterstock and Getty do not make money from their stock photography catalog, most of their revenue comes from maintaining exclusive contracts for editorial content (news photos, videos, etc) and selling licenses to those assets. Someone could easily displace them as they haven’t done anything with their companies but shrink contributor earnings and buy out smaller stock asset companies in the last decade.
Shutterstock usually acquires companies in the winter and lays them off in the spring and fall to boost their stock price.
There is no innovation at the company, just a set of long time engineers and their niche microservice and a rotating door of C-suite looking to collect a bonus from operating capital from layoffs. I do not see anything that actually benefits them being a publicly traded corporation or reasons they deliver actual shareholder value, but they soldier on.
- a former Shutterstock employee