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.<p>Shutterstock usually acquires companies in the winter and lays them off in the spring and fall to boost their stock price.<p>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.<p>- a former Shutterstock employee
Anecdotal, but I haven't bought a stock image since Stable Diffusion was released.<p>Edit: with Flux, you can't even tell the difference: <a href="https://blackforestlabs.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://blackforestlabs.ai/</a>
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.
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).<p>Hope that it doesn't change much for me.<p>Otherwise, I'm sure it will be OK.<p>Can't help but feel that this is a response to some of the AI image generation stuff.
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.<p>You'd be wrong.
The prices of photos sold by those services are insanely high.<p>Those businesses would be much more profitable if they lowered their prices significantly, but I guess the greed overshadowed their mind.
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.
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?
Worrying times for the dead weight in Shutterstock I'm sure!<p>A friend of mine works in their European HQ in Dublin and told me that their AI leadership are basically missing, leaving the office leaderless in favor of promoting themselves at tech conferences.<p>Hopefully Getty makes the necessary changes, because there are lots of good engineers in Shutterstock beholden to lots of bad management.
Stock image looks like a dead business walking to me. If the specific use case isn't important enough to hire an artist for it, I might just use SD.
Whenever I wanted to buy stock images, I was shocked how expensive they were. I usually didn't intend to use them straight up commercially, but I felt like I should pay for somebodies work to produce these images. The prices were too steep though.<p>Unsplash was a God-sent. High quality images with only attribution requirements, which I was happy to give anyways. But Unsplash was bought by Shutterstock and became "kinda free" with the good stuff being paywalled. And now Shutterstock merges with Getty, two of the biggest players in the space.<p>Frankly, I am quite convinced this is bad for end-users. The space is already enshittified by all the AI junk. So I fully expect quality to go down and prices to go up after this merger.