In the webcast about the merger both companies said ai had zero influence on sales and no loss occured. On the contrary their ai tools brought additional customers.

On Adobe the ai collection is a roaring success and many contributors make fantastic money with ai, while non ai ports report rising income as well.

Please stick to facts, not fantasy.

ss cut royalties drastically so produvers lost a lot of income.

As a result Adobe got recommended and preferred by the producer community.

I have found SS to be doing better than Adobe out of the last 3 months, at least for me anyway, based on images. In Jan so far SS are beating Adobe for myself, this hasn�t been the case for me before.

Quote from: cobalt on January 08, 2025, 23:52

On Adobe the ai collection is a roaring success and many contributors make fantastic money with ai, while non ai ports report rising income as well.

Please stick to facts, not fantasy.

You live in fantasy world my dear.  AI is driving hard stake through Microstock coffin, led by Firefly horror

Then you should quickly run and do something else.

Stock is over for you.

Good luck with your journey.

I'll keep the shutterstock account open until the merger happens then delete everything.

I'm lucky if I make $50 a month now compared to $300 to $400 per month a few years ago.

I'm sick of their squeezing contributors

Both Shutterstock and Getty have bought several agencies over the years and they have always kept them open and running, they have never merged it all into one.

I think this has something to do with search engine presence and they can offer different licensing types and also the agencies might be more active in different countries or markets.

So personally I am not worried.

Customers, especially high end customer,s are offered access to all content via internal marketplaces that you cannot see from outside.

The biggest risk is what will happen to royalties.

The licensing prices might rise, because they can offer customers a lot more content.

If the customers want cheaper content, they will have to go to much smaller agencies like depositphotos or freepik or some of the other smaller players out there.

But if shutterstock and getty don't have to fight each other with cheaper prices, in principle prices can go up. Adobe was never cheap and targets mostly enterprise customers.

I hope that Adobe pays 33/35% for photo/video will help prevent a drastic drop in royalties.

We will see.

But they don't divide customer requests over contributors. They serve up content based on what customers like and the algos don't care at all how much money you make.

As long as you upload content that the ai people have not produced by the millions you will be fine. Avoid the mass duplicates, do your own thing, make sure your port looks personal to you and unique.

And personally I think the value of camera photos and camera video will go up, also because it is needed to train future ai models.

Which is why this year I am pivoting back to camera action and much less ai.

Also gives me content to go everywhere, especially video sales should increase nicely.

Longterm my goal is 1- 2k a month from video, 2k a month from images including camera and ai content.

And then we will get dataset or ai use royalties, which will probably grow nicely over time.

I will probably need 20k videos and 30k good images to get near that goal.

We will see.

will istock will desapear ?

i hope so because i have a lot of photo there and make money.

Even if the companies merge, I think their websites won't merge.

But their 1 cent royalties will.

I always thought we were being lied to, by SS mostly, when they talked about the potential market and gains, from all the buyers that they hadn't made into customers. The 1.4 million in the world, is probably a stagnant or declining number. AI, free, pick something, it doesn't matter. The fact is, the numbers are declining.

Old data, but I don't see anything that would change the number, as people who worked Microstock, have left, and new people, with the get rich with AI and stealing, might have increased. 2018 Shutterstock, contributors with over 1,000 images. 17,877 Yet we heard and read about the millions of contributors. People signed up, people left. 35,000 is a nice number, for the top, and that doesn't mean active accounts, just accounts that are still open on SS, Adobe or iStock.

How many people are exclusive on IS? The rest of the images are likely to be the same as what SS has. The exception is, SS people who left when the new plan was introduced and SS contributors who don't bother with iStock because it's too difficult to add new work. The difference might just come down to, how many exclusives does IS have, and the rest are mostly the same images.

To end some of the rumors and speculation, here's the deal and the offer:

As per the deal, Shutterstock shareholders can elect to receive either $28.84870 per share in cash, or 13.67237 shares of Getty Images, or a mix of 9.17 shares of Getty Images plus $9.50 in cash for each Shutterstock share they own.

Based on the common shares outstanding as of the signing date, the total consideration payable by Getty Images would consist of $331 million in cash and 319.4 million shares of Getty Images.

At the close of the deal, the combined company will be 54.7 percent owned by Getty Images stockholders and 45.3 percent owned by Shutterstock stockholders.

Anyone buying SSTK at $30 is going to get $28.85 back per share, which doesn't make sense on the surface. However, if they take the 13.67 shares of GETY and it goes up, they could be earning much more. I'll show the numbers, as of today, and at the low end. Every share of SSTK at $30, if converted to 13.67 shares of GETY, at the low value of $2.50 would be worth $34.18 instead of $30. (I won't be calculating the split with the shares and money)

If someone buys SSTK at $30 a share they made $6 a share more than the cash buyout offer. Round numbers, thank you.

Members of the SSTK BOD will be on the board of GETY. This is a merger, not a take over or buyout.

Now about our future. What will the future bring? Who the heck knows. Things could improve or go down the sewer and get worse than ever. They could end up the same. I'm not counting on anything happening that will make us all more money, and if I had to bet, I'd say, we'll all make less. But how or what or what's going to happen, is just wild guessing, until the merger is approved and completed and the board gets together and figures out, what will make the new corporation the most money.

You can bet it's not going to be, by giving us a raise. On the more positive side, if we sell more, because of this, then we'll make more.

Back to the first line of this post. If the market is limited and the shares of that market are divided by SSTK, GETY and ADBE, (or PA News) then they are just moving the same buyers from one place to another, and not creating new business. Investors want growth and diversification. This merger is consolidation.

Oh one more thing.



None of the big three needs to buy any of the dregs and bottom feeders. They will go out of business and are insignificant as competition, if they stay open for business, through the next few years.

Pepsi. Coke, and Unilever are dominant. Coke is the smallest of those three in total sales size, because Unilever is more diversified. Market Share and dollars, those three are roughly 90% of all beverage sales in the world. Sure they want more, but back to Stock Photos. Getty/Shutterstock and Adobe are going to control the majority of all stock photo sales in the world, after this deal.

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I would think now that they can offer more content,  it is a good opportunity to raise prices.

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Raising prices doesn�t mean more money for producers

I do see a little silver lining, Getty likes to raise prices.

If the competition from SS is essentially gone, prices can rise.

You're assuming that Getty and SS raising prices means they'll pay more to artists. Absolutely wrong.

I'm on the stock business since 2007 (living exclusively out of it) and remember when SS raised what they paid to contributors for each download every year following the raise of the subscriptions to their clients. And they created the tiers that paid the artist up to $0.38 for every subscription sale.

After a few years SS stopped raising the payment per download, even if they kept raising the prices for customers. And finally they cut the $0.38 per subscription download to the current $0.10 even if you get to the higher tiers where you'd be supposed to earn more. And in all this they always raised the prices for clients.

There won't be any raise for artists even if they triple the licenses price.