Former Shutterstock employee (was laid off in 12/2022).
Shutterstock makes most of it’s money from two operations:
1. Editorial content - images/video of news related events. Pictures of celebrities or photos of Biden, pictures of the Met Gala, etc. They have exclusive deals that keep this pipeline alive.
2. Commercial licensing - HBO/Netflix will often bulk buy a set of a couple hundred images for promoting their new show.
Everything else is trash web development and tech. They fired their AI team and their current AI tech is just rewrapped existing engines such as DALL-E. In the last five years they’re internal teams redesigned their website/marketplace at least 3 times. From React to React to NextJS. They frequently purchase companies and lay off the teams after about a year (see ya Giphy).
Shutterstock doesn’t have to be good at tech because they can feed off of the work of other companies doing it for them. That’s why they let companies like Facebook blatantly train off their data set. That’s why they consumed PicMonkey.
To make it seem like they are an innovator they rely on yearly announcements of investment in new fads (like their current AI efforts) and lay off tons of teams to boost their stock price so they can say they save on labor costs.
They are ripe to be displaced either by a smarter competitor that can offer better compensation per image or by Getty Images.
Shutterstock makes most of it’s money from two operations:
1. Editorial content - images/video of news related events. Pictures of celebrities or photos of Biden, pictures of the Met Gala, etc. They have exclusive deals that keep this pipeline alive.
2. Commercial licensing - HBO/Netflix will often bulk buy a set of a couple hundred images for promoting their new show.
Everything else is trash web development and tech. They fired their AI team and their current AI tech is just rewrapped existing engines such as DALL-E. In the last five years they’re internal teams redesigned their website/marketplace at least 3 times. From React to React to NextJS. They frequently purchase companies and lay off the teams after about a year (see ya Giphy).
Shutterstock doesn’t have to be good at tech because they can feed off of the work of other companies doing it for them. That’s why they let companies like Facebook blatantly train off their data set. That’s why they consumed PicMonkey.
To make it seem like they are an innovator they rely on yearly announcements of investment in new fads (like their current AI efforts) and lay off tons of teams to boost their stock price so they can say they save on labor costs.
They are ripe to be displaced either by a smarter competitor that can offer better compensation per image or by Getty Images.