Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge | Hacker News Reader

Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge

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180 pointssexy_seedbox143 comments

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

Can you elaborate what is needed to compete and displace?

- 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.

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).

I never claimed they were an indexer, I claimed that is how a company to displace them would work. Everything you’re telling me is misguided is a misinterpretation about my claims of a non-existent competitor. Your interpretation of my response is misguided.

You don’t need a back catalog for a 30 year old photo of a shuttle launch, that wouldn’t sell to recent news outfits looking for latest editorial content.

The fact that Shutterstock has spent the last decade switching from php to react to nextjs and only acquiring their competitors is more than enough evidence they are easily displaced. The only thing your competitor has to do differently is not sell out to Shutterstock.

>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"?

If you remove the editorial arm, revenue would crater from only selling generalized stock photography.

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.

editorial and stock are two different categories and not the same thing

You can license editorial content (President Biden waving from the White House) or stock content (business man waving from the lawn of his house) for an editorial news piece. Editorial content refers to media assets of latest/trending events, not content for editorials written by press.

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.

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.

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.

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)

Unsplash is part of Getty Images.

From 2021: Unsplash is being acquired by Getty Images (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26634113)

> It was cheaper to hire a photographer to get the pictures you want, rather than license them from Getty.

And how much time would that take? People who are using these services need the photo NOW, and paying a few hundred dollars for licensing is perfectly acceptable for companies when the alternative is missing a publishing deadline or accidentally infringing on someone's copyright.

If you plan to hire a photographer arguably you would factor in that time it would take to get the assets delivered and there wouldn’t be this implication that you need the photo NOW. Savings with planning.

This is called "panorama rights" and is actually how it works in some countries.

In e.g. Italy, one is not allowed to take photos of (new?) buildings without the architect's consent, as far as I'm aware.

Insert reference to the most infamous “Eiffel tower at night” situation

Do you believe if their prices were half, they would sell twice as many?

So basically Getty Image layoffs announced today?

Effective in 3-9 months. Today is about pretending the company is growing with employees.

Your first sentence is self-contradictory. They are making money from their stock photos/images/videos. By charging fees for usage.

Okay you go work there and write a better sentence on how the money is made.

> 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.

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.

Sorry I don’t understand, how are they the bad guy in your scenario?

Presumably an online business should follow copyright law?

They're not saying they're the bad guys

“shady”

They seem to be claiming the image in this case got bumped up to the highest price tier only because there was a C&D notice.

Exactly - the price of that particular image switched to a higher tier just because they found a copyright infringement. This is the shady part. Back then I recall reading other threads about people in very similar situations. Unfortunately I'm not able to find those threads anymore, but I've found a Reddit post mentioning that Getty stopped with these shady practices when their CEO changed.

Edit: found something similar to what I mean [1], [2]

[1]: https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/625-De...

[2]: https://ryanhealy.com/getty-images-extortion-letter/

You could think of it as, it was bumped up to a higher tier because there is evidence that out of all their millions of stock photos, someone chose this one.

That would make sense if this was done _after_ they estimate the infringement price that they present in the C&D - which AFAIK wasn't the case

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

How are they suppose to do that without coming across shady?

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

That doesn’t seem shady. If you park in a meter, it may cost $3/hr. If you forget to pay the meter, the ticket may be $100. It needs to be more or it never makes sense to feed the meter.

It should be easy enough to prove if the image price itself changed, using archive.org or something. But if what you’re describing is just a penalty for using it without permission, I tend to agree with the others who feel that’s fair game. If the penalty for shoplifting was always that you had to pay for the merchandise you shoved in your pants, well, I think you’d see a lot less visiting of the check stand on the way out if you know what I mean.

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.

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.

> 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

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/

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.

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.

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

I 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.

It's like a person in the 60s saying "computers will eat everything". Were they in every device at the time, in every home, on your wrist, in your pocket? No, capability wasn't quite there yet, but it would be. Today we get uncanny valley, but I mean today, as in there are images coming out that are far better than uncanny valley, and it is obvious to all that this is (at least very very likely)a surmountable problem in the very near future. I think if you can put what you want the photo to be in words, stock photos are largely (not entire) dead.

"give me an elephant under a tree" "make it later in the afternoon". "not that late". "emphasize eyes just a scooch and make it look sad and pensive". "Not quite that much". "Clouds could be a bit whispier" Like you'd talk to a photographer, but with instant updates and no retorts like "great, are you going to pay me to camp out for days waiting for the clouds to move in the sky and then somehow hoping the elephant revisits this tree?"

Beats scouring a huge catalog (which, sure, will have AI powered search, but still), and suddenly, it isn't stock anymore, it is very particular to your specific needs. Custom to your needs, faster than getting a stock photo, and so, so much cheaper.

Lots of quotes and perhaps you missed my point. Its going to happen but in the near-term models are not good enough to satiate the demand.

Someone wants to buy something doesn't mean there is a market there, or that market is functional.

There is a difference between out of necessity and out of appreciation. Those are two completely different economies, later IMO, is much less predictable and reliable.

Not sure what your point is here? Current gen models don't satiate the need for photos yet.

I doubt you'll be able to easily tell from the outputs of frontier models for most stock image usages by the time this merger is approved.

"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!"

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.

Which models are SOTA as of now?

In terms of realism, Flux is leading the pack currently

Over Midjourney?

Yeah, Midjourney tends to create sci-fi/enhanced looking humans. Flux creates photorealistic.

Interesting! What's the best way to check it out? Via API?

I would say Flux leads the pack in COHERENCY not necessarily in terms of sheer realism. (See the Flux chin).

SDXL + LoRA easily eclipses Flux in realism, but prompting is 100% more difficult for complex scenes.

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?

I swear Microsoft is half the market for this. I can't remember the last time I saw them for an image which did not give off that exact vibe in over a decade.

It's pure slop, of the non-AI kind.

Until when?

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.

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.

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.

Oh, please. I've generated many, many images. They are not hard to spot.

The bad ones are of course not hard to spot. The good ones you'll never notice.

Good ones /of what/?

Are we talking a human subject? Nature?

Much respect, but nowadays, unless the person put basically zero effort to make it look realistic, there's no way you can detect whether an image is AI or not while quick scrolling. Obviously, if you look at every image as "let me examine every part of it to see if it's AI or not" mindset, you can still spot them. But anyone who spent a few days playing with the latest gen models, can create images that pass the 90% of sniff tests.

Do you have a test you like? I just took one at https://sightengine.com/ai-or-not?version=2024Q3 and got 18/20 correct, and I'm not zooming in on details or anything, I'm just using some basic discrimination based on what I've generated and seen generated in the past.

I would do even better at this if we limited it to pictures of "realistic" settings.

I think we might be talking about two distinct cases. If you're actively thinking whether an image is AI or not, you're already biased to it potentially being AI-generated. That improves your recognition of slop-finding. As I mentioned, I definitely agree how it's fairly straightforward to spot the slop if you're looking for it.

I'm not even sure how we could implement a real-life test without bias. Maybe if there was a complete feed of your internet browsing, where it asks you at the end of the day "ballpark the % of media that you think was AI?". Then go through the entire feed, and scrutinize it one by one.

Right, and even there I think we might need to get specific about categories of images. Images that are supposed to be photo realistic are far easier to spot than "battleship in outer space" generations.

Bringing it back to the topic of stock photography: A large percentage of stock photos are of real things, people, scenery. So, when someone says I'll have a hard time spotting generated stock photos, I kinda go uhh, well, no, not generally, because stock photos are very often of people and real life scenes, the thing that is the easiest to spot as a generation.

Has anyone said you will have a hard time spotting them? Because I did not. I pointed out that when you say you can, it is an instance of survivor bias, and it is, whether you are good or bad at it as long as we don't have data to tell whether your assumptions were correct.

We still don't know whether or not you're good or bad at picking out AI images used in actual campaigns, because we have every reason to assume at least a reasonable proportion of AI images used in actual ads will have been through an editorial process that'd rule out a lot of the easily recognized shlock, and so a test that does not use images that have been through the same selection process is meaningless.

I have no doubt you can recognize some. You may well be able to recognize all of them perfectly for what I know. The point was not to argue you can't, but that your impression can't reliably tell you, because you'd be likely to think the same whether your accuracy is high or low.

I’m not entirely sure why you’re discrediting the advancement of realism. I’m very sorry, but I have a hard to believe that when you scroll through IG and see something like this — https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1hvdhie/this_girl_... , you’ll think it’s AI instantly. Unless, again, you’re consciously examining whether every single piece of media is AI generated or not.

A couple of things:

1. This idea that "you can't tell if you mindlessly scroll past it" isn't a very good measurement.

2. Given IG is slowly filling up with AI slop, I actually do spend a decent amount of time going "is this AI-generated".

3. I'm not discrediting "advancement of realism" in AI at all. I'm just saying it's much, much easier to detect AI when a generation is supposed to be of something real.

You've already indicated elsewhere that in a test of images that had not been edited, or selected to minimize the risk of detection, you as someone who has spent lots of time generating AI images got 2 out of 20 wrong. So clearly it's possible to fool you.

How many more do you think would get past you if the person running the hypothetical campaign was someone with a similar experience at picking images to you spending the same amount of time they would picking stock photography on ruling out any picture that looks like it's AI-generated to them, or editing them to remove things that'd tip you off?

The major thing that's happened to me, is I start doubting every image I see in an ad. If it looks too generic, too plain. If I have a negative perception of the company, I start to think it's an AI image and further entrench my negative opinion of the company.

Maybe it's not rational. Maybe I can't tell the truly good AI images form the cheap slop ones. But that's how I feel, and ultimately a lot of commerce runs off customer feelings. The faker, cheaper, and more soulless we feel a company is being, especially in marketing, the more negative perception we have of them. That's just me though

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.

Stock photos always looked cheap anyway.

Both low talent AI use and stock photos have their own look about them and neither is premium.

I think half of the YouTube thumbnails now are AI generated.

Frankly speaking they are getting so good I can hardly tell by first glance

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)_/¯

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.

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".

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.

If you think people can't tell when you've cheaped out on them, you're the sucker.

No anti-trust here? Seems like their market share might be too unreasonable to me.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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

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).

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.

Just think of all the re-watermarking that will have to take place!

I hope they call the merged company "gutterstock"

shütty !

Shetty Images

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.

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.

They are both public companies. They cannot tell you the news privately before a broad announcement.

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.

Feels like Getty has acquired all their big competitors.

Is this a defensive move, against AI taking over the stock image market?

Both of them already provide AI image generation themselves.

https://www.shutterstock.com/ai-image-generator

https://www.gettyimages.com/ai/generation/about

if you're going to get scraped anyway, might as well get paid

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.

Just don't show the hands of those people

The defensive move here is the sellers cashing out while they still have a decent valuation and taking their money elsewhere.

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.

Probably the plan is to sue big, and convince investors that's going to work.

The 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.

You'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.

> 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.

Right. 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.

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.

Ghutterstock has plenty of $$$ to make a lawsuit. If the image catalog is close enough, that is a copyright violation.

I have always held Getty at a much higher level than Shutterstock. I find this a bit sad.

The axis of stock photography

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?

The new company to be called... Ghutter Stock?

Worrying 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.

Layoffs coming. The government needs to grow a spine and halt about 90% of these M&A's.

The current government did exactly that, and we voted them out.

The current government is still the current government. Not sure how that applies here.

For the next 13 days. It is a lame duck government.

And it's quite likely that any ongoing actions against M&A will likely be chucked with the new regime.

What, 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?

Naming opportunity: Shitty Images

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.

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.

> 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).

So 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

It'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.

I don't mind transferring euros to a bank account, it's more about american systems doing fraud detection and deciding I can't pay with a german address and a dutch bank account (stripe illegally (https://www.acceptmyiban.org) rejects that for example, can't pay for DeepL...; or paying for food with a german credit card and Dutch IP because my mobile data routes through NL, also gets rejected), german credit scoring being mandatory to force a "pay later" scheme on you when you just want to pay up front (involves either phishing you or validating your phone number), paypal simply having a broken UI that goes "something went wrong", etc.

Everyone with a bank account can transfer money online, merchants just need to accept it and not try to use dumb schemes that charge extra fees on top of the bank fees to "support more payment methods", that's my problem...

That’s why we’ve built Catch+Release, to make sure that creators are equitably compensated when licensing their content: https://www.catchandrelease.com

The page mentions UGC in prominent places without explaining it, alongside vague claims like "You may now license the internet" and "Harness the power of authentic content". Am I not the target audience, are these things that visitors are simply supposed to understand?

Edit: doing a search, is this like YouTube results? I thought Getty images and Shutterstock were for photos you can put in an article, presentation, website, game, etc. There's also no license mentioned for any of the results that I see. I really have no clue what this website or its videos are about, even with the context of this thread

Fair point. Most of our users are marketers and producers who are familiar with these terms, but we could make it clearer to those who are not in the know. Thanks!

Stock images only have okay pricing (per image) if you use some sort of decently sized subscription. Anyone that only needs a few images are unfortunately screwed.

Pexels is still very free, and seems to be high quality.

not an anti-trust problem?

Stability AI just has little to no chance in winning that lawsuit against them and almost certainly has to settle with Getty.

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