8 ms·
Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge
- sexy_seedbox 2y agoFeels like Getty has acquired all their big competitors.
- TMWNN 2y agoIs this a defensive move, against AI taking over the stock image market?
- elpocko 2y agoBoth of them already provide AI image generation themselves. https://www.shutterstock.com/ai-image-generator https://www.shutterstock.com/ai-image-generator https://www.gettyimages.com/ai/generation/about https://www.gettyimages.com/ai/generation/about
- Raed667 2y agoif you're going to get scraped anyway, might as well get paid
- animuchan 2y agoNot 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 2y agoJust don't show the hands of those people
- blitzar 2y agoThe defensive move here is the sellers cashing out while they still have a decent valuation and taking their money elsewhere.
- Ekaros 2y agoI 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.
- vintermann 2y agoProbably the plan is to sue big, and convince investors that's going to work.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI'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 2y agoJust think of all the re-watermarking that will have to take place!
- dotdi 2y agoWhenever 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. 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. 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.
- muhehe 2y ago> Whenever I wanted to buy stock images, I was shocked how expensive they were. It's funny, because authors of those images (at least on Shutterstock) get basically nothing (like ten cents for photo, iirc).
- Aachen 2y agoSo how do we fix it? Better search/aggregator engine and unified payment scheme, but photographers get the money directly and simply pay 1 cent per purchase that came via the aggregator, rather than having to sign away their rights and getting pennies from a centralized platform? Wondering if photographers can't already do this with regular search engine's image search, which (speaking for myself) is what I use when looking for usable images anyway. It often lands me on something like shutterstock but it's almost always too expensive, annoying to pay, or badly licensed. If they support common payment methods from around the world, anyone can buy unwatermarked versions for a dollar and the photographer gets 100%. I guess the downside is having to have a website of your own? Many photographers already have this anyway though
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoIt's crazy after all this time we still don't have low friction small transaction capability on the western world's web. When I was in China way back in 2014 it seemed like they had an ability to this person to person from your phone, so why can't we get it for the web? Maybe there's enough out of work developers someone can go after this seemingly low value but wished for since forever payment space.
- Ekaros 2y agoNo anti-trust here? Seems like their market share might be too unreasonable to me.
- DannyBee 2y agoIn 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoThe 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.
- Jerrrry 2y ago[flagged]
- mikeyouse 2y agoThanks for the input I guess? Anyway, I was just commenting on Lina Khan vs Andrew Feeguson’s stated intentions for the FTC: https://archive.is/3TXZq https://archive.is/3TXZq > Ferguson will almost certainly scrap Khan’s signature merger policy. The departing F.T.C. chair — along with Jonathan Kanter, the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division — made a point of opposing far more mergers than many of her forebears. Not every case ended in victory, but legal experts said that her approach helped reshape aspects of U.S. competition law and slowed down the pace of M.&A. That approach is likely to end under Ferguson, an F.T.C. commissioner who has objected to Khan’s activist strategy. (He’ll have the votes at the agency, with Trump having also picked Mark Meador to join as a commissioner, most likely giving Republicans a majority.) > In a pitch for the agency leadership position seen by Punchbowl News, Ferguson, who doesn’t need Senate confirmation, said he would “reverse Lina Khan’s anti-business agenda.”
- Clubber 2y agoLayoffs coming. The government needs to grow a spine and halt about 90% of these M&A's.
- paxys 2y agoThe current government did exactly that, and we voted them out.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoWhat, you don't think a functional societal financial system can be based solely on M&A's and corporate loans taken out for stock buybacks?
- cloudking 2y agoAnecdotal, 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/ https://blackforestlabs.ai/
- Etheryte 2y agoThere 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.
- infecto 2y agoI 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 2y agoPhoto 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
- infecto 2y agoI don’t think the market agrees here. Sure if you want a super obvious ai generated image of an elephant with wings great. But even for the most generic stock photos, the models are not there yet. People still want to buy photos of an abstract idea.
- 2y ago
- cynicalsecurity 2y agoThe prices of photos sold by those services are insanely high. Those businesses would be much more profitable if they lowered their prices significantly, but I guess the greed overshadowed their mind.
- michaelbuckbee 2y agoYou're right and wrong. While they're very expensive to me in my everyday life, they were originally 10x cheaper than the alternative: getting custom photography done for ads, websites, brochures, etc.
- mschuster91 2y ago> The prices of photos sold by those services are insanely high. That's because private citizens are not the target group of Getty, Shutterstock etc. - the target group are newspapers, TV stations, high-profile/fulltime YouTubers and media/advertising agencies. They all have these expensive stock photo licenses because that's cheaper than hiring dedicated photographers. Whatever shot you want - unless it's of your product or you have very specific artistic needs, chances are very high one of the stock photo services (either Getty, one of the large press agencies such as AP or local/industry specific services like Imago that specialises in sports) will have whatever shot you need. And that kind of database access is not cheap to start.
- ghaff 2y agoRight. There's no way you can provide meaningful compensation for photographers/artists from a target market of need some fairly random image/graphic for a blog post. But photographers on staff are expensive. And even as it is, a lot of us who toyed with submitting to microstock for a bit mostly gave up. They don't even want a lot of nature/flower/landscape photography and once you've got pictures of people, you need to faff with model releases and the like--and you still don't even make beer money.
- hardwaresofton 2y agoThe axis of stock photography
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- righthand 2y agoShutterstock 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
- dpflan 2y agoCan you elaborate what is needed to compete and displace?
- righthand 2y ago- 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 2y agoThis 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).
- raincole 2y agoStock 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.
- bambax 2y agoI'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.
- righthand 2y agoThe 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.
- paxys 2y agoThey are both public companies. They cannot tell you the news privately before a broad announcement.
- anonstock 2y agoIf 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.
- oldgregg 2y agoSomebody 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nojvek 2y agoGhutterstock has plenty of $$$ to make a lawsuit. If the image catalog is close enough, that is a copyright violation.
- Over2Chars 2y agoThe new company to be called... Ghutter Stock?
- ThinkBeat 2y agoI have always held Getty at a much higher level than Shutterstock. I find this a bit sad.
- paxys 2y agoShares 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.
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoDoes 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?
- josefritzishere 2y agonot an anti-trust problem?
- rvz 2y agoStability AI just has little to no chance in winning that lawsuit against them and almost certainly has to settle with Getty.
- Simon_O_Rourke 2y agoWorrying times for the dead weight in Shutterstock I'm sure! 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. Hopefully Getty makes the necessary changes, because there are lots of good engineers in Shutterstock beholden to lots of bad management.
- benrapscallion 2y agoNaming opportunity: Shitty Images
- lucasauton01 2y ago[dead]