A Getty Shutterstock merger might get scrutiny from the US government's anti-trust watchdogs.

SS / Getty merger makes little sense to me (but what do I know).  What would be much more logical is Adobe / Alamy merger, or Adobe buying Alamy which has strong Editorial foothold, and this is something Adobe lacks.  Ain't gonna happen but if it would I'd become exclusive. One can always dream.

Re Adobe stock drop: not really surprising. Heavy bet on that abomination they call Firefly had to come back & bite them where sun doesn't shine. I really hope they drop it. Not likely though

I do see the point that together they are a much larger business and can save a lot of costs by combined their teams (and cut down on people).

But who would be running the show???

If it is Getty, then the new company would have good media experience and probably the shutterstock library would get cleaned up drastically to remove undeclared ai.

Getty also has a great editorial team, so they could just take over.

But...if it is the Shutterstock management taking over...then Getty/istock will get run down.

That would then affect a lot of people  still making a full time income with Getty.

If it is a Getty organized buyout, I do see an advantage in a more professionally run Shutterstock and maybe a rise in clients.

I simply cannot imagine that Getty would be sold out to Shutterstock, it would probably then mean the slow death of both agencies.

Perhaps Oringer and partners want to get out.

Sell Shutterstock while the slow death is not so easy to see.

They are already being targeted by short sellers.

eta

After actually reading the links it looks like Getty is in the drivers seat.

SS stock has dropped a lot, it is actually quite clever of Getty to try to take over.

SS looks like a mess with all their mad aquisitions but no rise in sales.

For the istock exclusives this would be very good news. All the customers they could not reach, those clients will now be coming to them.

It will make istock exclusivity more attractive again.

Just to make this clear for our speculation. Getty has 3 times the corporate value of SS, roughly. 3 Billion vs 1 Billion. Getty has double the stock value of SSTK. But Getty has been paying back a large chunk of their profits (which makes them at a loss each year) for old debt. Getty doubled their customer base last year, but is still making less money, because these are the subscription buyers, not the high value, single image customers.

As far as all sources have reported this, Getty is the one proposing the merger. GETY stock jumped up and so did SSTK, based on the proposal of the merger.

I know that first I thought of "merger" I imagined one big agency. But the more I think about it, this could be a corporate merger, which leaves each as a division of the same corporation, operating on their own. No change for us.

I ask myself, do I want 15%, no change, no options, or do I want the essentially meaningless, annual reset and dime downloads. Yippee, I was up to 25 or 30% at SS and still getting 10-12� per download. 15% of a higher number has generally been, more than the measly SS dimes.

If you have Editorial, remember when iStock cut the Editorial News images because it was competition for Getty? They disabled 3,657 of mine, which was most of my IS income. Will Getty ask SS to do that as well?

Every article includes that the market for stock images has been severely devalued by AI, which is cheaper and easier to access.

Seeking Alpha incorrectly says that Getty went public in 2008 - they were bought by Hellman & Friedman in 2008 and taken private.

Getty was brought back on the market through a SPAC, IPO in July 2022. Investors bought in at $10 a share.



"Deliberations are ongoing and Getty could choose not to pursue a deal, the report added." I don't trust much of this as anything but unconfirmed rumors. Maybe a pump and dump.

depends on how this merger is managed,there are many possible scenarios.

however I don't know why every articles say "market for stock images has been severely devalued by AI" because that's simply not the case.

Istock was the first to devalue the market by lowering prices to attract more customers and reducing royalties to 15% a decade before AI,they started playing with the spring,which is a lot of fun,but then this game bounces back in your face! 

the price of digital content to the end customer must rise,the percentages for contributors must increase.

everything is increasing and we have to earn more,simply this.

AI will never be able to replace the work of digital media creators,AI certainly change,AI have changed the scenario,the type of work a lot....but AI will never be able to replace creators in my opinion,at least not in this century I think! 

The people talking about "ai devaluing stock images" have obviously never tried to create something specific with ai.

Once you have wasted an afternoon on trying to create content, you will gladly buy from agencies again.

It simply doesn't work, you need far too many attempts and then you still need to edit in photoshop.

What was bringing prices down is the oversupply and more content being created in countries with lower costs of living.

But that is only true for images.

Why agencies decided to lower the prices for video even though there still is very little content, is something I don't understand.

Making web sizes cheap for social media use, ok, but why bring down the costs of 4k?

They might call it a merger, but the only logical way to go about it is if Getty takes over. They are the people with a solid understanding of the stock market.

Shutterstock used to have that, but they gave it all away 3 years ago.

You're more optimistic than I am.

I have used AI to generate dozens of images that I used for mockups in a regular basis. This is coming from someone who has had a lot of success in microstock, only to see a steadily decline in the last couple years, which coincides with the rise of generative AI.

Images doesn't have to be perfect. It just have to be good enough. A lot of companies cancelled their SS accounts because they no longer need to pay for an expensive subscriptions when they can generate free images every day from certain services.

I've generated some AI podcast via google in german (sorry guys!) from the reuters and bloomberg news:
https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/f38ddd09-762d-4a21-9543-6f68f9f98bbe/audio

Thank's god we have gemini.

Why agencies decided to lower the prices for video even though there still is very little content, is something I don't understand.

Making web sizes cheap for social media use, ok, but why bring down the costs of 4k?

I believe this trend has been largely driven by competition from agencies like Artlist and Storyblocks, which offer unlimited downloads through annual subscription plans. In free-market economies, prices for goods and services are fundamentally influenced by competition, supply, and demand�core principles of basic economics.

Here's a timeline of major mergers and acquisitions since 2009 that I put together.

Have I overlooked any other ones?

Source: https://brutallyhonestmicrostock.com/2025/01/04/breaking-news-getty-images-and-shutterstock-discuss-potential-merger/

I thought about putting another column on "Has it benefited contributors", but it's very difficult to know for sure...except for perhaps the SS acquiring Pond5 one.

Updated chart, thanks Jo Ann for inputs.