January was very bad. Revenue was only 28% of the revenue in December.
But SS revenue is significantly higher than AS and P5 revenue every month.

February is already looking much better. Got another nice $150-surprise.

I think SS is not dead but very much alive.
P5 is showing signs of dying in my opinion. Had 60% less revenue in 2023 compared to last year.

Yes some are making more in Adobe stock because AI is permitted but the AI models are evolving so fast that in no times customer will no longer need to look into a library. Not a second. They will generate what they want and with tons of option, styles etc. Video will take only a little longer to follow that path but as we saw with SORA just a few days ago it is arriving faster than I thought.

It is a total game over for all stock producer. This will no longer exist in 5 years at most.

Will be as easy as to type and search into a library with Ai images. The advantage in library is that all there is a curated collection for which someone spend his time to generate, select the best and edit, then on second level curated from the agency side. I wouldn't bet on Ai generation over curated Ai collection, but who am I to tell, for example Shutterstock bet on Ai tool exclusively and they are recently "extremely successful"

20K clips - 280$ so far in February, last year around this time in February it was 3000$+ what�s going on?


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I'm scared and shivering.

I honestly think that my work deserves 3000$ on a February at Shutterstock. 8 years into stock, nice portfolio, SS used to be the god of stock for me for years. A switch was pulled on my portfolio and for many others, making way for fresh clips I assume, even though I try to shoot timeless subjects.


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the AI models are evolving so fast that in no times customer will no longer need to look into a library. Not a second. They will generate what they want and with tons of option, styles etc.

I think there will always be a demand for editorial photos.

Shutterstock's quarterly report will be out tomorrow.

Very mixed bag, but their stock is down this morning (more than the overall market). Depending on which statistic you focus on you could talk up the successes or bemoan the falling short. Can't fathom why they are highlighting targets for 2027 - unless it's to distract from less desirable things between now and that glorious future

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/shutterstock-nyse-sstk-misses-q4-121001195.html
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/shutterstock-inc-sstk-reports-mixed-123416222.html

In their statement section on Q4 FY 2023 financial "highlights" everything was a decrease from Q4 FY 2022!. Fewer subscribers and fewer paid downloads too (35.4 million vs 42.5 million)

https://investor.shutterstock.com/node/13506/pdf

There is a lot of interesting stuff in there.

They greatly increased their income from data licensing, that went up 256%. So their ai data licensing plan is going very well.

Their income from stock decreased, but not drastically because they were able to increase the average money they get from customers.

But they did lose subscribers and in the last quarter their number of downloads was just 35 million instead of 42 million downloads in the last quarter of 2022.

That is a drop of 16%.

What I also find interesting is the number of assets in their library.

photos/illus grew from 719 to 771 million files 22 to 23.

Videos grew from 47 million to 54 million.

So in the entire year SS only added 7 million videos and 52 million other files.

Isn�t that less than half of what they used to get? Does pond get only 7 million videos a year? Or Shutterstock?

I remember that SS used to get more than 2 million files a week.

If these numbers are correct, they are getting a lot less content than before.

Does anyone have old statements to compare that?

For 2024 they expect the business to be steady.

eta

further down this report they show the growth of assets

images grew from march 22 to march 23 from 471 million to 731 million.

but by end of dec 23 it only grew to 771 million.

for videos it grew from 25 to 48 million march22 to march23 but for december 23 they only show 54 million a much slower growth.

So they are getting a lot less content than before. Obviously producers are not happy with the reset rat race system and the loss in income and sales.

Will be interesting to see next quarters library size.

eta2

so if the adobe library is growing normally PLUS they have a beautiful 40 million strong ai collection�then as a commercial use customer Adobe will look much better.

So it is not a surprise many customers are switching.

I also wouldn�t be surprised if there is also a big difference in the quality coming in.

Which at some point will affect the ai licensing deals, adobe and getty can do them as well.

@Cobalt:
Thank you for listing some very interesting data!

The strong growth of the database seems to be declining massively and that is not surprising from our point of view - every year the download race starts anew and we earn little in the first quarter - conversely, the Q1 results at Shutter should actually be better than in the other quarters.

I have contact with some of Shutter's customers and they have been very dissatisfied with the quality of the material for a year or more now, and they also complain about the search because they can no longer find what they are looking for.
So I immediately believe that subscribers are being "lost".

The AI income is currently still a kind of "salvation" for Shutter, but if the number of new images no longer increases so much and less and less good material ends up there, then Shutter will slowly but surely do away with itself.

I wouldn't mind, because what they've done with us contributors fits in very well with this endless spiral of greed.

Have a sunny day,
Michael

These figures really stand out as pretty bad:

Fourth Quarter 2023 as compared to Fourth Quarter 2022:
Income from operations decreased 72% to $2.1 million.
Net income / (loss) decreased 114% to a $1.0 million net loss.

They can always increase their own profits by cutting payments to producers even more. On Getty the lowest paid is 2 or 3 cents.

And if they add the exclusive pond5 content to the SS subs plan, many customers will return or they will get new customers.

They will keep getting uploads and if their main focus is ai, is high quality content even needed for licensing?

Perhaps the initial batch with lots of high quality content is enough to establish a baseline.

And if they need fresh high quality content they can specifically order that from stock factories.

So, at least for a few years, even if the sales from the stock business goes down, the datalicensing can probably keep them going for quite a while.

eta

perhaps someone can dig more into the numbers, what if they made 300 mio from selling stock but 700mio from data licensing?

a combination like that might be more profitable and require much less staff.

as long as ss brings in more money than dreamstime or deposit, they will get content.

eta2

I would not be surprised if this years exciting news is that all p5 exclusive content that has not sold in 3 years or that has never sold, will have the wonderful opportunity of getting additional earnings opportunities via ss subs program.

Cook the frog slowly and most people will stay.

They are dead and we will see their stock value plummet in the next 2 years. Same will happen with getty. They don't stand a chance against Openai or Google Gemini. It's over for the stock sites. Even Adobe I doubt will be able to compete with this huge players.

They can always increase their own profits by cutting payments to producers even more. On Getty the lowest paid is 2 or 3 cents.

And if they add the exclusive pond5 content to the SS subs plan, many customers will return or they will get new customers.

They will keep getting uploads and if their main focus is ai, is high quality content even needed for licensing?

I am quite sure that in at most 2 years only a 10% of the subscribers will remain in Shutterstock or the other sites. We will see . it does not look good for them. When SORA will be out it will be the final blow.

From the report:

Subscribers: 523,000, down 63,000 year on year

Income from operations decreased 27% to $68.4 million

Operating cash flows decreased $17.9 million to $140.6 million

.......

It seems they're maximizing their profits as much as possible. Yet, if subscribers start to leave, I question the bright future they're promising.