as someone who spent more than a decade In the stock photography and creative tools industry, I have seen firsthand how it has evolved. The news of a potential Getty and Shutterstock merger got me thinking about how stock photography industry actors found themselves at a crossroads and what the future holds. That’s a great thing, but can it really fix the problems of falling prices, AI disruption, and unhappy contributors?
Let’s look at how we got here and what the future holds.
The consolidation of the stock photography market into an oligopoly did not happen overnight. Getty Images, Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, and to a lesser extent, Canva now dominate, but their journeys to this point have been quite different.
Getty Images: Growth was held back by massive debt in the early 2000s
Getty Images was one of the first companies to enter the market of content licensing and remains the only company that transitioned from an expensive, contributor-awarding rights-managed model to a full-fledged industry-wide one-size-fits-all microstock royalty-free model. Have seen development. An approach driven by technological advancements and globalization. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it built its dominance by acquiring dozens of photography collections and responding to market threats with acquisitions such as iStockphoto and JupiterImages. Notable acquisitions such as WireImage and the Hulton Archive strengthened its editorial dominance, which could only be challenged by the real-time coverage of Reuters or the Associated Press.
For commercial photography, there were times when professional photographers depended on Getty above everything else, and getting accepted there was like winning a lottery ticket. On the business side, Getty’s dominance in news, sports and entertainment imagery made it the go-to platform for publishers, broadcasters and marketers in need of timely and exclusive visuals. However, the growth spurt did not last forever. A private equity leveraged buyout left the company heavily in debt, stunting its growth. While Getty remains a great business and the undisputed market leader in editorial, archives and premium imagery, its revenues have remained virtually stagnant for the past 15 years.
Shutterstock: Technology Disruptors
Shutterstock began as a creative-first platform focused on royalty-free commercial imagery. Unlike Getty, it avoided editorial content for years. Its momentum increased when Insight Partners invested $50 million in the company to create a new market leader. Aggressive technology innovation drove growth, marked by a successful IPO. In 2014, Shutterstock reported $328M in revenue, a remarkable growth rate of 39% year-on-year.
However, the 2014 acquisition of Fotolia by Adobe forced Shutterstock to rethink its strategy. This led to the introduction of the Shutterstock Editor (2015) and a series of acquisitions to diversify its offerings:
- Bigstock (2009): Early entry into microstock.
- WebDAM (2014): A DAM tool later sold for profit.
- Rex Features (2015): Access to editorial content.
- TurboSquid (2021): The leader in 3D content.
- PicMonkey (2021): A design tool acquisition.
- Envato (2024): Acquired for $245 million to target value-conscious customers.
While these acquisitions helped Shutterstock expand, they also highlighted the challenges in achieving organic growth in recent years. Despite its expanding portfolio spanning commercial video, music, editorial content and AI-powered data licensing, Shutterstock’s core downloads have remained stagnant or declined. The company’s scale is huge, with revenues of over $900 million, but its market cap of $1 billion reflects uncertainty about the future.
Adobe Stock: Ecosystem Giant
Adobe’s entry into stock photography through the acquisition of Fotolia was strategic. By integrating Adobe Stock into Creative Cloud, Adobe locked in a loyal user base and created a seamless experience for its customers. This synergy has been a key driver of Adobe stock’s growth, with Creative Cloud reporting $12.5B revenue for fiscal 2023. Unlike Getty and Shutterstock, Adobe has focused on its ecosystem rather than dominating the broader market.
current scenario
Now, the merger of Getty and Shutterstock creates a huge value above $3.7BStrengthening oligopolies but raising important questions about how they will advance an industry facing falling prices, contributor dissatisfaction, and the existential challenge of generative AI.
Generative AI: the existential challenge
Generative AI tools like OpenAI, MidJourney, Stability AI, and others are fundamentally changing the way visual content is created. Lesser-known tools, like KREA.ai, built on Flux, are capable of generating exclusive content on demand, but adoption remains slow due to the time and skill required to master the appropriate prompts. The learning curve, inconsistent results, and copyright uncertainty prevent mass market penetration of these AI tools, but will eventually be resolved, as has been the case with every significant disruption in modern history.
Editorial imagination, on the other hand, remains somewhat untouched by this disruption. You can’t create real-time images of major events, celebrities or sports games using AI. However, the same forces driving down creative content prices are affecting editorial collections, albeit at a slower pace. For Getty and Shutterstock, their joint editorial offering will be a competitive edge, ensuring its presence as an important tool regardless of AI progress.
On the creative side, AI training data has become an important revenue source. Both Getty and Shutterstock are licensing their vast libraries to AI companies, and leveraging their proprietary content for training generative models. When those efforts are combined and aligned within the same company, it will create significant advantages that can lead to success in copyright disputes. Companies like Stability AI, which are currently facing lawsuits from Getty Images, may have few options but to reach a settlement before losing in court. However, relying on data licensing as a lifeline is not sustainable. As AI models become more self-reliant, their reliance on licensed training data will reduce, leaving platforms struggling to replace this income.
Contributor: Spine Under Pressure
Most analyzes leave the contributors aside, but I won’t. Contributors have always been the backbone of stock photography platforms but their relationship with these platforms is becoming increasingly strained. Getty historically pays contributors a low percentage of the prices paid by subscribers. In contrast, Shutterstock has maintained higher royalty levels and established minimums for RPDs, giving contributors more stability. However, both platforms are likely to pursue contributors as they face increasing pricing pressures and AI disruptions.
Niche contributors may find new opportunities as platforms look to diversify their libraries, but for non-niche creative content suppliers, a royalty squeeze seems inevitable. The oversupply of creative imagination and the inability of contributors to unite for action only exacerbates the problem. The last notable success was the anti-Dollarfotoclub movement a decade ago.
Does it really matter?
The harsh truth is that technological advancements, globalization and the race for competitive development among agencies have led to an overabundance of creative imagination. Examples of this oversupply are everywhere. Search for any common term on a stock platform, and you’ll find thousands, if not millions, of similar images. This abundance, combined with AI’s ability to generate hyper-specific content, has devalued creative imagination across the board. Platforms need to re-imagine their role in this new landscape. For businesses, this means that stock photography platforms don’t just need to provide access to images – they need to provide tools, integrations, and a unique value proposition.
Getty and Shutterstock have significant incentives to adapt. Their vast libraries give them an edge over AI companies, allowing them to monetize their data for training while they can. Also, both platforms should move faster to integrate generic AI into their ecosystem. While they already have many AI-related deals and capabilities, to remain relevant in the creative content market, they will need to invest heavily in proprietary generative AI models or bet on ethical platforms like BRIA.ai (if not acquired ) may be required.
This could mean offering proprietary AI-powered tools that allow contributors and users to create and manipulate visuals on demand. Without this change, they risk losing relevance as businesses turn to platforms that provide seamless, on-demand solutions.
Getty Images/Shutterstock The merger is a defensive move in a rapidly growing industry. This creates a dominant force with huge content libraries and operational scale, but it does not solve the fundamental challenges facing the stock photography market. Generative AI is reshaping the way businesses think about content creation, putting huge pressure on traditional stock models. Already stressed contributors may face further cuts in royalties or be forced out altogether as platforms adapt to new market realities.
For Getty and Shutterstock, the way forward lies in leveraging its strengths while embracing the future. They must invest in AI tools, move beyond the era of boasting the largest content library and redefine their value proposition. To stay relevant, they need to find ways to move from just selling images to truly becoming a creative platform and seamlessly integrating into their users’ workflow. Mergers buy them time, but the real question is: can they innovate fast enough to remain indispensable in an industry that is being disrupted on all sides?
About the author: Vadim Nekhai is the former CEO of DepositPhotos, where he started at the company in 2012 as Chief Marketing Officer. He served as the vice president of the organization from 2021 to 2024 after it was acquired by Vista Print, now known simply as Vista. For more information on this topic, Nekhai published a longer version of the above A blog post on LinkedIn,