Wow, this is big news and could change a few things.  I'm holding off any hopes / dreams that changes will be better for the photographer, but a part of me has a hard time not doing so.  At the very least, I would think that this will open up a very large sales channel.

If I can add pictures without joining Fotolia.

So I wonder if this is going to turn into an App or if Fotolia is going to become the backend for a new version of Behance. Either way, Adobe's subscriptions are all pretty straightforward. $X per month for Lightroom. $X for Photoshop. And it will probably be $X per month for stock photos. I can't imagine Adobe going with all kinds of confusing options of subscription, pay-per-download, tiered pricing. Flat monthly fee subscription added as part of their cloud offering.

Unfortunately with a behemoth like Adobe backing the stock subscription model this will probably be a big nail in the coffin for higher priced RF and RM. If they would have bought Getty I would have had some hope of a macro RF/RM revival and prices going up. Macro will be dead in a few years. 

Every time something major happens I say it's gonna get interesting. Not this time. Nothing in this industry seems to be improving for contributors. I can't see anything good for contributors coming out of Getty, Adobe, and Shutterstock battling for supremacy. 

Macro will be dead in a few years. 

why it should die if the RF industry is going cheaper and cheaper ?

it would be logical that hard to find and/or expensive shoots move to RM while anything else moves to RF and RF editorial in my opinion.

there's still demand for RM, of course it's not big but as long as it's there RM is here to stay and always will because no matter the price it's still a lot more convenient than hiring somebody on assignment.

RM is perfectly suited for unconventional editorial needs and so called "obscure subjects", you'll never find that stuff sold as RF because it just doesn't sell there.

I've got a feeling that this is great news for Adobe, and not so great for suppliers of content in general.  If they're going to supply this as part of their "Creative Cloud" offering they're going to look at cutting their costs to a minimum. 
I don't use Adobe products these days.
I've used The Gimp for years, and RawTherapee for the past few years. To be fair I don't have to supply images to printers or to work on files with other people, and I don't make vectors for clients or resale.
I can do what I need to as far as RAW conversion and image manipulation is concerned.
I can do it at no cost.
I look at it as business. I get paid a few $$ for each sale I make (if I'm lucky these days) I don't want to pay a large chunk of that back for something that's not essential to me.
It would be a cold day in hell anyway when I would pay a monthly subscription for software. I see monthly payments for pretty well anything non essential as being insidious. "Only so much a month"

Worst case scenario in my mind would be images selected "for free" from within the software, without being bothered by having to go to the web site. Further eating away at images having value / needing to buy images.
The whole industry, powered by greed, has been heading there for a long time.
Long term it may be good news for people doing very specific commissioned shoots, as presumably people will still need those sorts of images, but will be made to pay for the proper value for them as they won't be available as stock.

And that was my point. Prices will not be going back up.

not for RF but the demand for niche RM has no reason to stop suddenly and since the price is linked to supply vs demand i don't think the RM prices are going to drop to micro levels ever.

Think as contributor, I'll stick with Fotolia (opted out of DPC) to see what the deal is that Adobe is offering. If it seems attractive, I'll give it a year but as FT makes me around 10% of Shutterstock income with the same  files, it's an indulgence I could easily give up. For image factories and contributors with 5K+ files, I imagine that their decision process would be different. 

Opinion piece:

Audio-Interview with Paul Melcher about Adobe�s Acquisition of Fotolia

Quote from: bunhill on December 14, 2014, 13:34

Opinion piece:

Audio-Interview with Paul Melcher about Adobe�s Acquisition of Fotolia

Just to save some time for some people, I listened to the whole thing, and they don't discuss possible impact on contributors until 16 minutes in to the recording.   And Mr. Struck seems very excited about having a large market place to sell his images but no discussion of possible cuts to contributor rates.  To me, the main thing is what will I be paid per DL thru the Adobe platform.  I don't really care about speculation of the impact on the financial markets or convenience to buyer experience unless it puts more money in my pockets.

So true!!

I listed to most of it, but found it to be so light on content - even informed speculation or historical context of how similar things have played out in the past - that I stopped it before the end.

Even if you put the contributor perspective to one side (easy for me to do as I'm not with Fotolia ) I think you need to put away the breathless excitement about someone paying $800 million for a rather shoddy agency with a great presence in Germany. Also put away the rather wooly discussions about the cloud - Adobe CC is about a subscription to one or more products that run on your Mac or PC (at least for the serious users) - nothing much runs in the cloud.

Unless Adobe makes Dollar Photo Club-esque pricing deals available to Adobe CC subscribers - in other words some drastic price cuts - I can't see how I'd have any easier time buying and managing my RF licensing by doing it from Photoshop or Illustrator (or somewhere else?). Adobe can't even get the interface lined up between Illustrator and Photoshop for similar entities in both, so the idea that somehow there'll be some interface magic that makes licensing easy from a UI point of view seems truly silly (not impossible, just not something I can imagine Adobe being able to pull off).

So we come down to the basics. Will they compete on price by undercutting existing agencies? I can't imagine they'll be somehow finding new buyers for licensing stock, so however they compete, I'm assuming they'll be stealing from other agencies (or trying to).

If they cut contributor payments too much, content will leave and then they'll have less than a a top tier offering. If they keep contributor payments the same, how long can they compete on price and make financial sense of the whole thing?

Buyers seem to be having relatively few troubles licensing images now (they'd like better searches and lower prices, but manage even with things as they are). They may be leaving one agency and moving to another when daft pricing schemes get introduced, but it's not at all the way it was when microstock came to be in the early 2000s.

Adobe seems (to me) to be peddling a solution in search of a problem. If you surround that solution with enough buzz words (and cloud is definitely a good one right now) perhaps no one will notice?

And if they act aggressively and disrupt the stock market sensitive, then they will lose as a result not only contributors, but also those that rent PS Lightroom and Illustrator in the cloud. Photographers and graphic artists who produce for stock, are a part of Adobes clientele.

+1000 on that part.  Hope they remember it.  Another big site forgot that and look where they are today.

Adobe says they will keep FT as it is. That's expected, because there's an established return and distribution system. Maybe $200 million a year. (hey, that's quite a nut, how much do we get of that?)

Having the files on CC through Adobe, my guess is part of the subscription, not an additional plan. Millions of new customers, all Adobe products included, will boost sales.

As many have noted, this will bring an enhanced presence into the North American market.

In theory: FT contributors will see no loss at this point. Maybe an increase.

However...

There's no reason why Adobe won't squeeze contributors for the CC DLs, which are likely to be offered "free" with the package. How low will they go?

What does this mean for the little sites, DT and everyone down the list? It's going to be another industry giant putting the "squeeze" on their profits and our income. Which in effect will lead some to be culled out and others to continue to cut prices and commissions, in an effort to make any small profit they can, before they go under.

What I'd like to see is a way to integrate uploads through the CC software, going straight into Adobe and bypassing FT.

But the conclusion I've come to personally, besides the unknown and future change, is that for this deal, Adobe / Fotolia, the word of the year 2015 will be squeeze.

which are likely to be offered "free" with the package. How low will they go?

Interviewed here, Adobe Creative Cloud "Evangelist" Michael Chaize is quite specifically talking about integrating the purchase of content. He goes on to say that the vision is that the Adobe CC will become a place where creatives also sell their content.