Shutterstock and Getty do not make money from their stock photography catalog, most of their revenue comes from maintaining exclusive contracts for editorial content (news photos, videos, etc) and selling licenses to those assets. Someone could easily displace them as they haven’t done anything with their companies but shrink contributor earnings and buy out smaller stock asset companies in the last decade.
Shutterstock usually acquires companies in the winter and lays them off in the spring and fall to boost their stock price.
There is no innovation at the company, just a set of long time engineers and their niche microservice and a rotating door of C-suite looking to collect a bonus from operating capital from layoffs. I do not see anything that actually benefits them being a publicly traded corporation or reasons they deliver actual shareholder value, but they soldier on.
- a former Shutterstock employee
You can't innovate your way out of basic economics. The value of a photograph has continued to decline year after year to the point where it is now ~$0. The licensing revenue pie is getting smaller and smaller, and so companies in the space have been shrinking and consolidating to adapt to it. That's all there is to it.
I'd argue that the value of a photograph is not $0. The problem is rather that its actual value is lower than the $200 that Getty wants for a 3MP picture of a hamburger.
I've been in projects where we cleared the rights for every picture, and it's always the same: either we blow the budget on two pictures with strong usage restrictions or we replace them all with CC alternatives.
Perhaps photographs need their Steam moment.
TLDR; Just use http://www.unsplash.com for free professional photos.
100% agree. Years ago I signed up for Getty images (royality based) back when they were competing with Fotolia (royalty free) before they were bought by Adobe, and actually clicked through the shopping cart to see how much it would be to license a picture of some nice autumn leaves for a billboard or a calendar. It was an insane amount in the hundreds of dollars, and it was time limited, and only for a limited run (if you used them for example, a calendar), the usage rights were insane. And if you wanted the full resolution it was something like $1,000+ dollars. Our minds were boggled. We honestly legitamately thought Getty images was some kind of money laundering operation. It was cheaper to hire a photographer to get the pictures you want, rather than license them from Getty.
Yes they have some nice rare photographs of political events (wars, earthquake response, important cultural news photos) but they are insane for thinking their entire catalog is deserving of royalties and time/run limitations. The only thing Getty did was convince me that copyright needs to be heavily reformed. (The photographer isn't paying royalties to all the people who made the objects in the photo, yet they're asking for royalities just for taking the photo)
Unsplash is part of Getty Images.
From 2021: Unsplash is being acquired by Getty Images (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26634113)
> It was cheaper to hire a photographer to get the pictures you want, rather than license them from Getty.
And how much time would that take? People who are using these services need the photo NOW, and paying a few hundred dollars for licensing is perfectly acceptable for companies when the alternative is missing a publishing deadline or accidentally infringing on someone's copyright.
If you plan to hire a photographer arguably you would factor in that time it would take to get the assets delivered and there wouldn’t be this implication that you need the photo NOW. Savings with planning.
This is called "panorama rights" and is actually how it works in some countries.
In e.g. Italy, one is not allowed to take photos of (new?) buildings without the architect's consent, as far as I'm aware.
Insert reference to the most infamous “Eiffel tower at night” situation
Do you believe if their prices were half, they would sell twice as many?
Shutterstock doesn’t sell digital assets, they sell the license to use assets. The value of a stock photograph for marketing has decreased YoY, but the value of the license to use that photograph has only gone up. The consolidation is a trick they play on shareholders to convince them they are gaining value through assets, even though the value of assets is $0.
That is why a good portion of their earnings calls are about miscellaneous vague initiatives defined as an acronym and how much they saved on operating capital through acquisitions and layoffs.
The only way to increase the value of a license is with exclusivity. In which case the only remaining innovation is to direct the value back to the contributor. Which in turn would shrink the company.
Why do they need innovation? They just have a product that works, like a company that makes nails. Is there much for a nail company to innovate all the time?
It’s a boring job that has been long figured out.
Sure, they can diversify by adding other services, just like how a nail company could start making screws, but that’s not really innovation… that’s just doing something else altogether. Should Getty diversify? Maybe, but it would be more for their own survival than actually making their core product better.
If you are looking for a job that has innovation, you apply in an industry that still has places to go. You can’t work for a nail-making company and then complain that they aren’t re-inventing the world.
> Is there much for a nail company to innovate all the time?
Of course there is, you can innovate to use less metal maintaining quality (see aluminum cans as an example of this in a similarly boring tech with "no innovation potential")
In services there is an even bigger potential to create more value
They also make money by chasing down people who use their images without paying a license (fair) by "extortion".
Once my co-founder used an image downloaded from Google (bad!) for the company website, GettyImages noticed that and threatened our company to legal actions (C&D) unless we pay the price of the license for the stock image, which magically became "premium" (or whatever their top tier is) for the occasion.
They're for sure right in making you pay in case you're illegitimately using their images without a license (totally fair IMHO), but the way they do it is very shady.
Hi. You are talking about me. I'm involved in multiple infringement settlements and lawsuits every year. Perhaps I should point out that I have spent thousands of my own dollars, and hundreds of hours photographing subjects that are rarely seen much less captured with a camera. My images are licensed hundreds of times every month. They are also frequently stolen. If you steal one of my images you are going to get a demand letter. The price will be far higher than any licensing fee. This is because my images are registered with the copyright office at the Library of Congress which entitles me to seek punitive damages.
The writing has been on the wall for decades. Images are losing value because millions upon millions are created every hour of every day. However, some of those images are remarkable and unique. People can make a lot of money if you happen to be the copyright holder of these images.
An example I like to give is the photographs Gary Rosenquist captured of Mt. St. Helens exploding and the side of the mountain sliding away. Nobody else captured this sequence. Not even close. These images make substantial licensing fees to this day.
I've long been fascinated by the fact that a camera can capture subjects the human eye cannot properly perceive. It just so happens that this obsession has led me to create images that are hard to imitate. I feel no guilt in charging fees for my images. I feel no guilt about pursuing people who have stolen my images for their own projects.
If you are photographing bald eagles with an American flag in the background or frosty fall leaves artfully arranged on the ground - I agree with the gist of this thread - these images are worth practically nothing. But this not universally true for all images.
Sorry I don’t understand, how are they the bad guy in your scenario?
Presumably an online business should follow copyright law?
Yes, they're not the bad guys for making people respect their copyright (there have also been cases where Getty re-licensed public domain images and threatened people in similar ways, but that's a different matter).
Assuming they're the legitimate copyright holders, the shady part is increasing the price of the image on their website to make you pay more than what you should as soon as they notice the infringement - and threatening legal actions if you don't pay the image price
They're not saying they're the bad guys
“shady”
- [deleted]
They seem to be claiming the image in this case got bumped up to the highest price tier only because there was a C&D notice.
Exactly - the price of that particular image switched to a higher tier just because they found a copyright infringement. This is the shady part. Back then I recall reading other threads about people in very similar situations. Unfortunately I'm not able to find those threads anymore, but I've found a Reddit post mentioning that Getty stopped with these shady practices when their CEO changed.
Edit: found something similar to what I mean [1], [2]
[1]: https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/625-De...
You could think of it as, it was bumped up to a higher tier because there is evidence that out of all their millions of stock photos, someone chose this one.
That would make sense if this was done _after_ they estimate the infringement price that they present in the C&D - which AFAIK wasn't the case
How are they suppose to do that without coming across shady?
The shady part is the part where the price of the image magically increases (on their website) as soon as they detect a copyright infringement, so that they can get even more money from you.
All in all, as stated in the original comment, I believe it's in their right to do so (because the copyright infringement happened), but they take advantage of this in a shady / scammy way
That doesn’t seem shady. If you park in a meter, it may cost $3/hr. If you forget to pay the meter, the ticket may be $100. It needs to be more or it never makes sense to feed the meter.
It should be easy enough to prove if the image price itself changed, using archive.org or something. But if what you’re describing is just a penalty for using it without permission, I tend to agree with the others who feel that’s fair game. If the penalty for shoplifting was always that you had to pay for the merchandise you shoved in your pants, well, I think you’d see a lot less visiting of the check stand on the way out if you know what I mean.
So basically Getty Image layoffs announced today?
Effective in 3-9 months. Today is about pretending the company is growing with employees.
>Shutterstock and Getty do not make money from their stock photography catalog, most of their revenue comes from maintaining exclusive contracts for editorial content (news photos, videos, etc) and selling licenses to those assets.
How are you not counting that as "making money from their stock photography catalog"?
If you remove the editorial arm, revenue would crater from only selling generalized stock photography.
Okay then there are better ways to phrase that distinction, because what you've described is still "licensing stock photography". The editorial arm is just a means by which they license.
editorial and stock are two different categories and not the same thing
You can license editorial content (President Biden waving from the White House) or stock content (business man waving from the lawn of his house) for an editorial news piece. Editorial content refers to media assets of latest/trending events, not content for editorials written by press.
> There is no innovation at the company, just a set of long time engineers and their niche microservice and a rotating door of C-suite looking to collect a bonus from operating capital from layoffs. I do not see anything that actually benefits them being a publicly traded corporation or reasons they deliver actual shareholder value, but they soldier on.
They don't care.
> I do not see anything that actually benefits them being a publicly traded corporation or reasons they deliver actual shareholder value, but they soldier on.
Well they should have already known that OpenAI (and others) have license agreements directly from Shutterstock to train AI models such as DALL-E 3 (or DALL-E 4) and that is of interest to Getty to own the rights to the images.
Stability AI has close to no choice but to settle their lawsuit against them.
Can you elaborate what is needed to compete and displace?
- a stock photography collection to make your site seem full of content
- organize the labor to shoot photography and video around editorial content and empower them to sell their own assets with tooling
- as an indexer you only take a 30% which is much lower than the aggressive everyone loses shutterstock-getty cut
———
Personally I imagine a decentralized approach where contributors host the content or purchase hosting space from the indexer. The indexer just provides a search platform. Transparent costs will keep people at your doorstep and maintain exclusivity.
It is important to understand that Shutterstock does not sell assets, they sell the licenses to use the assets.
This is misguided.
First, you can't "organize labor" to take an iconic photo of a shuttle landing that happened 30 years ago. That is, there is enormous value in their existing library.
Second, decentralized photography is called Instagram, yet those photos aren't worth anything. Instagram has no interest in licensing them. Instead, they monetize around the photo (engagement) and not the photo itself. The real value has been in the content produced by professional photojournalists.
Whether Getty/Shutterstock is a good business is a different topic. They've been around for a long time, despite your claim they are "easily disrupted." You both underestimate the value of indexing (distribution) and mislabel them as being merely an indexer (they protect rights, organize deals, bundle and package, centralize relationships, to name a few).
I never claimed they were an indexer, I claimed that is how a company to displace them would work. Everything you’re telling me is misguided is a misinterpretation about my claims of a non-existent competitor. Your interpretation of my response is misguided.
You don’t need a back catalog for a 30 year old photo of a shuttle launch, that wouldn’t sell to recent news outfits looking for latest editorial content.
The fact that Shutterstock has spent the last decade switching from php to react to nextjs and only acquiring their competitors is more than enough evidence they are easily displaced. The only thing your competitor has to do differently is not sell out to Shutterstock.
Your first sentence is self-contradictory. They are making money from their stock photos/images/videos. By charging fees for usage.
Okay you go work there and write a better sentence on how the money is made.
- [deleted]