Delaying the inevitable
Why the merger between Getty Images and Shutterstock is about bulking up and what it could mean for the broader AI race.
Dear readers,
Not a day goes by right now where social media app TikTok isn’t in the news. The ban’s deadline is 3 days away, the Supreme Court is leaning towards upholding it, the rumor mill has the Chinese wanting Elon Musk to buy it (please don’t give this man another megaphone), the Democrats introduced a bill that is asking to delay the ban by 270 days, TikTok apparently is preparing to shut down the app on Sunday, and Trump wants to issue an executive order to extend the ban by 60-90 days.
What. A. Saga.
That’s why we’ll focus on a different news headline this week. In terms of the associated money and the size of the market, it didn’t get as much attention. But due to its implications for the red-hot race to the best AI, it deserves a closer look.
We’re talking about stock image competitors Getty Images and Shutterstock merging to create Getty Images Holdings.
The new entity will be worth roughly $3.7 billion and is expected to deliver annual cost savings between $150 million and $200 million. That’s pretty meaningful for a company (Getty) whose EBIT took a nosedive from 2021 to 2022, dropping from $258 million to $83 million - a decline from which it hasn’t recovered (2023 came in at $100 million).
And that is actually the point of this merger - it’s about bulking up to slow down the decline. The stock media market has just been hammered in the last several years by innovation and disruption from multiple angles: the rise of integrated platforms like Canva, creative technology giant Adobe acquiring Fotolia, and of course the biggest of them all - GenAI.
Trying to run from their fate (AI)
Getty Images, Shutterstock, and similar companies can’t run from their fate - but by joining forces, they’re making themselves both more attractive and they’re slowing down the inevitable.
Earlier this week, I was on a call with an investment banker who is very close to the senior decision makers at Anthropic and OpenAI, arguably two of the three most relevant AI companies (I see Google with their solution Gemini as the third one). He confirmed what I highlighted as a key theme for AI companies in 2025: they are looking for (read: need) new and ideally exclusive data sets to continue to train their AI models to give themselves a sustainable competitive advantage. Signing new content licensing deals that allow OpenAI to let their models crawl whatever unique data set they can license is a key strategic priority for all AI players.
This is where the merger of Getty Images and Shutterstock comes in. Together, these two companies arguably possess one of, if not the, most extensive, high quality, and exclusive image data assets globally. The value to Anthropic or OpenAI to own this asset exclusively and have the ability to constantly access fresh content through Getty’s photographic talent is massive. Today, you can already ask ChatGPT to write you a paragraph in the style of a specific author. What if you could ask DALL-E, Sora, or Claude to generate you an image in the style of your favorite photographer? That, and more, would be possible.
Whether this happens in 2025 or 2026 depends a bit on how fast Getty Images and Shutterstock get the approval for their merger. But on the path towards image generation capabilities where you truly can’t tell a human-made photograph apart from a computer-generated visual, look for OpenAI and Anthropic to make a bid for the new entity to buy it and own the data asset exclusively.