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Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge

newsroom.gettyimages.com

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Re: Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge

#71

Post by SilasX »

righthand wrote: post #69
SilasX wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Re: Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge

#72

Post by paxys »

bambax wrote: post #50

I've been a (small time) Shutterstock contributor for over 10 years. You'd think they'd send a mail to the people producing the images to announce something like this, instead of waiting for them learning about it in the press. You'd be wrong.

They are both public companies. They cannot tell you the news privately before a broad announcement.

Re: Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge

#73

Post by paxys »

Shares of Getty and Shutterstock have been down 36% and 22% respectively in the last year, in a market that went up by 25% in the same period. It is obvious that neither company has a sustainable business model anymore. Whether they can combine and turn things around though remains to be seen.

Re: Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge

#75

Post by paxys »

righthand wrote: post #32

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. Shutterst…

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.

Re: Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge

#76

Post by grouchomarx »

SilasX wrote: post #71
righthand wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge

#77

Post by jnwatson »

devin wrote: post #65
vidarh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Survivor bias. In that, you're reacting only to the images you assume are AI. It could be you're really good at spotting them, or they're really bad. But it could also be you spot a tiny proportion, or even misidentify real images as AI. Without knowing the real rate, it tells us nothing about whether picking AI images over stock images is a good tradeoff or not.

Oh, please. I've generated many, many images. They are not hard to spot.

The bad ones are of course not hard to spot. The good ones you'll never notice.

Re: Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge

#78

Post by righthand »

SilasX wrote: post #71
righthand wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Getty Images and Shutterstock to Merge

#79

Post by bediger4000 »

DannyBee wrote: post #11
Ekaros wrote: post #9

No anti-trust here? Seems like their market share might be too unreasonable to me.

In the US this would not be enough - at a minimum, you'd have to show actual harm, like, for example, showing it has caused (or is very very likely to cause) higher prices for folks. I don't know enough about stock images to say for sure, but a cursory glance suggests Getty has not been raising prices outside of the norm over time. It would be a very hard case to win without a bunch of unfavorable data.

> at a minimum, you'd have to show actual harm, like, for example, showing it has caused (or is very very likely to cause) higher prices for folks.

I'm sure that's the legal criteria, but why do I get a feeling of "time to move along" when I use a product of one of the merged companies? Every telecom merger, every food or book publisher merger, every aerospace company merger, has passed the review you state, but very shortly products are no longer made, services are ramped down, quality degrades.

As an employee, I've been through mergers as well, the merged company always sucks more than the original. Sometimes for trivial reasons (CXOs chose the worse of the two time card systems), sometimes for a multitude of reasons.

As a consumer and worker, I have acquired a reflexive suspicion and dislike of mergers.

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