The world’s two dominant stock photo companies, Getty Images and Shutterstock, plan to merge in a massive deal worth as much as $3.7 billion.
AI is, of course, putting stock libraries under pressure, with many creatives asking why they should pay what can sometimes be a small fortune for an image when the latest AI image generators can come up with the same thing for peanuts. Yes, there’s a whole mass of arguments against doing that encompassing a growing range of considerations from the moral to the creative to the environmental to the legal, but it’s happening and this deal between the world’s two biggest stock libraries, Getty Images and Shutterstock, is one response.
While it’s being billed as a merger, effectively it’s a takeover. Despite having a host of well-known brands under its wing such as TurboSquid, Pond5, PremiumBeat, GIPHY, and Envato, Shutterstock is the smaller of the two companies. The financials reflect this: Getty’s shareholders will own the majority of the new company which will still be called Getty Images and will continue to trade on the NYSE under the ticker symbol GETY, which all seems fairly unequivocal.
The combined companies hope to have a yearly revenue of just shy of $2bn, 46% of which comes from subscriptions, and expects to save between $150 and $200m in costs over the first three years.
Shares of both companies jumped at the news, but what does it mean for users and contributors? As PetaPixel notes, figures from Mordor Intelligence suggest that the current stock photography market is worth $4.98bn. That means that the newly merged Getty Images will represent 75% of the market, which is a hugely distorting monopoly position and likely to trigger antitrust actions in the US.
The incoming Trump administration is expected to have a distinct laissez faire attitude when it comes to these things, but there are definite implications here that will need to be looked at. Getty and Shutterstock have both used their market dominance to help drive rates for photographers down over the past years, the combined company will further limit consumer choice, and then there are issues of AI.
One of the big drivers behind this deal is undoubtedly the desire to have an even bigger library of images to train AI on and Getty has just bought itself over 500 million royalty-free images, videos, music tracks, and illustrations to do that with. That means the combined company has over 1 billion assets to train its AI systems on. Elon Musk might opine that we have exhausted real world AI training data, but corporate America reckons it can still access more.