Quote from: cobalt on May 16, 2026, 18:24
If they cut royalties even more, where is the good quality content going to come from?
Just look at the crap SS is now forced to accept, because a lot of good content is no longer going there.
Ai companies don't need junk, they can scrape that for free from social media and the public internet. They coem to stock agencies because they want quality images.
If the ais are trained on crappy images, the output will be crappy.
Search results on Shutterstock are flooded with junk already. This is a deliberate financial policy by the company to squeeze maximum profit for their shareholders.
If you read their official SEC filings and investor presentations, the whole truth about the algorithm and royalty tiers comes out:
Top-tier creators are bad for their margins. Shutterstock explicitly states in its reports that contributor payouts are their largest operating expense (SEC Form 10-K, Item 7). If the algorithm puts a top-tier contributor on the first page, SS has to pay them up to 40% per sale. But if they push a newcomer's junk content to the front, they only pay 15%. The search algorithm is tuned for the company's wallet, not for artistic quality.
The tier reset policy. In their reports, SS openly admits that earnings are now strictly tied to annual volume (Form 10-K, Item 1). This reset was invented for one purpose only: to slash our earnings and redirect those millions of dollars into investor dividends and stock buybacks. They are intentionally stopping us from growing our tiers.
The "Shutterstock 2027" strategy cuts contributors out completely. Look at their official long-range targets. They write in black and white that integrating GenAI is aimed directly at "lower cost of content creation." They don't plan to sell your premium work. Their goal is to shift buyers to their own AI tools, where SS keeps 100% of the money without sharing it with anyone.
They don't care about quality, they just want data. SS no longer worries that the marketplace has turned into a dump. They are now selling the raw database (our images, tags, and keywords) to tech giants for AI training. Even the millions of images rejected during review are essentially free data capital for them.
