Congrats on your anniversary!

Hope your hard work keeps paying off!

While I'm not disputing that their growth is definitely slowing, there's not really anything in this chart that gives the impression they are ''going bust''.

How much of that revenue is "bought" revenue?

And inspite of buying so many customers and client contracts, they are losing business and have a strong drop in uploaded assets.

But I agree, they can probably keep doing this for years.

However I believe if they had stuck with the original team, open forums and direct intensive contact with customers and producers, the graphic designers at the heart of their business, they would have grown a lot more and could have saved themselves hundreds of millions of dollars.

Instead of buying pond5 and envato, they could have invested 500 million into growing their own business.

For the money invested, what returns did they get?

Quote from: ADH on May 02, 2024, 14:45

The company where my husband works has already adapted to the new realities, they have cancelled the subscription with one of the most important stock agencies they have worked with for 15 years for another subscription with mid journey for $30.00 per month.
They are saving thousands of dollars a year with this move.

Out of curiosity do they have a feel for how much employee time is spent generating an image vs. searching a stock database for an image?

generating and post processing, I barely to 10-20 files a day. Can�t imagine a designer has time for that. And if you want something really specific it can take even longer.

Will be interesting to see how this all develops, i think the ideal solution for clients are combo packages that show you both prompted files plus agency search content based on the prompt.

And then tweak your files in photoshop with gen ai.

It is a balance of course and in principle growing market share through acquisition can be very strategic and beneficial.

But you must have a basic understanding of client needs and in our case clients and producers are often the same people.

Much worse than not being able to grow the business organically is the severe drop in uploads, especially video uploads.

And then you have to consider that their lack of growth already includes all the customer contracts they bought when taking over other stock companies.

So how bad is it for Shutterstock itself?

So between p5 and envato they spent around 500 million dollars.

I can think of a lot of things you can do with 500 million to grow organically and attract market share.

Buying smaller, specialized collections is a different thing, but p5 and envato, at least in principle, should have similar content to Shutterstock and also mostly the same buyer group, especially p5.

Overall for producers I do not think this will bring a big change.

Adobe changes nothing and keeps growing their business and their uploads from producers keep increasing.

Will be interesting to see what happens next year when ai video becomes really usable and Adobe can start building a huge ai collection.

That will attract a lot of interesting talent, so many people out there wanting to do their own little movies and clips. They have great ideas but no Hollywood budget.

Adobe can position itself as the true indie creative hotspot with that.

They can supply ai stock clips, but also buy a lot of clips to adjust with ai for their needs.

Like with images, Adobe offers both tools and resources and integrates itself smoothly into the workflow.

How will istock and shutterstock compete against that?

Agree, their solution to "growing the stock photo business" is to buy other companies, because they don't seem to have any ideas how to create real organic growth by themselves.

It is not a bad decision, they consolidate more of the global stock pie for themselves.

Will be interesting to see what they do with the place. Envato is a much smaller company with a smaller library.

Perhaps they will bring in a flood of Shutterstock content. If they do, how will their producers react to having files on an unlimited site?

I have content on envato and I am fine with my results. Will keep adding more content when I start doing normal photos again.

But if a Shutterstock stock flood is coming in, the volume of sales might go down because of the new competition.

We will see.

I don't think this is a major disturbance in the stock force and actually will make Adobe stand out even more with their organic growth and better sales.

More than last year over all agencies, but less than March

The overall collection growth also includes the endless number of duplicates of duplicates.

How much of the content added is really new??

Probably just a tiny fraction.

As a producer you need to always monitor the content arriving in your personal niche and target group.

If the new content coming is much better quality than what you are offering, chances are your sales will slag.

If what is coming in is similar or even worse quality, there is not that much too worry about.

So even if Adobe adds 500 million new files a year, I wouldn't be surprised if only 5 million are truly new and unique content.

Well, we might be going down, but Adobe itself is still selling well. Otherwise our ranking would go up even if our sales are slowing down.

So we simply don't have the right content for what buyers are looking for right now.

I did upload quite a bit of summer content, but I think it arrived too late and just like with people I have no footsteps in the summer algos.

Next year will be better.

But to have a place where blocked accounts can be discussed is useful. Producers need freedom to talk about their problems.

If Adobe bans it from their company support groups, that is their decision, but personally I do not believe that is helpful.

And talking about the blocks also helps to create awareness for the problem and especially what kind of mistakes will trigger a block.

For instance there is the problem of credit card thieves abusing a portfolio and as a producer you have zero influence on that. But can be punished by losing access to your income and having all your image algos reset.

Then there are many people who are completely new to stock, who are being edged on by youtubers and simply make mistakes because they do not know that what they are doing is wrong.

And finally you have actual criminals, who upload stolen content, who buy each others files to improve their rank etc..

All these cases need a different level of attention.

However, although all agencies suffer from the same criminal activity I only see Adobe blocking accounts of reliable, decades old producers abruptly.

So, of course people are terrified!

There should be some kind of system in place, where reliable producers have their issues cleared up much faster.

That would help to alleviate the real fears in the community.

you don't do olympics with olympic rings or anything copyright related

you do people celebrating with gold medals, people doing sports, large stadions around the major olympic summer sports

general sports competition stuff and obviously never any copyright danger keywords

winner loser scenarios, goals, achievement, hard work success can also be used in many other themes outside of sparts as well

same like for content that supports the superbowl time, world football competitions, the oscars etc...there is also something you can do that is free of copyright but works for these events

compared to april 23 i am up by 51%, so I should probably not complain. but compared to march 24 I am down by 57%...

and...it is far from enough money, so...I will complain

summer is always very slow for me.

what is good is that many of the illustrations that I uploaded last year, that never got a single sale, are slowly beginning to sell. I simply have no "footsteps" in the algos for illustration.

for now illustrations are perhaps 5% of my sales, although it is over 20% of my port. longterm I hope it will increase and I will learn what I can produce that customers like to buy.

Fantastic news! Thank you for letting us now!