51–60 of 152 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I can't afford real images of real people and can't tell these images are shit, but you can rest assured that I didn't take any short cuts on the product!"
I can afford them, I just don't need to anymore. My use cases for stock photos are websites, marketing, landing pages etc. The SOTA image models are sufficient for my use cases and my customers don't care. Infact, they are happy with the quality of AI generated stock photos and appreciate the fast turnaround and lower cost.
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…
Can you elaborate what is needed to compete and displace?
- 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
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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.
Anecdotal, but I haven't bought a stock image since Stable Diffusion was released. Edit: with Flux, you can't even tell the difference: https://blackforestlabs.ai/
There are plenty of businesses that think the same way and every time I see an ad with an image that's clearly AI-generated I steer clear of it. It looks cheap, hits the uncanny valley and is often a good sign of lowest effort possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of businesses that think the same way and every time I see an ad with an image that's clearly AI-generated I steer clear of it. It looks cheap, hits the uncanny valley and is often a good sign of lowest effort possible.
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.
Anecdotal, but I haven't bought a stock image since Stable Diffusion was released. Edit: with Flux, you can't even tell the difference: https://blackforestlabs.ai/
There are plenty of businesses that think the same way and every time I see an ad with an image that's clearly AI-generated I steer clear of it. It looks cheap, hits the uncanny valley and is often a good sign of lowest effort possible.
Maybe it's not rational. Maybe I can't tell the truly good AI images form the cheap slop ones. But that's how I feel, and ultimately a lot of commerce runs off customer feelings. The faker, cheaper, and more soulless we feel a company is being, especially in marketing, the more negative perception we have of them. That's just me though
Anecdotal, but I haven't bought a stock image since Stable Diffusion was released. Edit: with Flux, you can't even tell the difference: https://blackforestlabs.ai/
I'm a small-time Shutterstock contributor and my best sellers are all news-style images from actual events. (For example, when announcing a future conference, a publication often likes to illustrate the article with images from the previous iteration). While possible, those are more difficult to reproduce with AI. Shutterstock used to have a program called "Red Carpet" where they endorsed independent photographers to…
Whenever I wanted to buy stock images, I was shocked how expensive they were. I usually didn't intend to use them straight up commercially, but I felt like I should pay for somebodies work to produce these images. The prices were too steep though. Unsplash was a God-sent. High quality images with only attribution requirements, which I was happy to give anyways. But Unsplash was bought by Shutterstock and became "kind…