The Getty-Shutterstock Merger is Yet Another Step in a Race to the Bottom

This week, Getty Images and Shutterstock announced an intent to merge, bringing together two of the top three largest stock photography companies together. It’s just one more step down the road to rock bottom.

Getty Images, which already owns iStock, stands to become a hulking behemoth in the stock photography market if its merger with Shutterstock is approved. Exact numbers on how valuable this industry is vary, but different intelligence-gathering agencies estimate its current worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $4.98 billion with the potential to reach as much as $7.3 billion by 2030. To put that in perspective, the new Getty Images after the merger is estimated to be worth $3.7 billion — that’s nearly 75% of the entire market’s value in 2025. One company owning that much of the industry would give it significant power to control pricing and squeeze out smaller companies like DepositPhotos, Dissolve, and even Adobe Stock.

For years, stock sites have been weakening in value to photographers. Even the number of those who work directly for a company like Getty has been waning and the value of the contracts has become significantly reduced compared to 10 or 15 years ago. By owning more of the market, Getty opens up its options. On the one hand, it can push the value of individual photos down further so that it can attract more companies with a lower price. Lower buying price means lower commissions for photographers since Getty is going to want to make as much per photo as possible, even while it’s reducing their value.

Getty could also keep prices the same but move to give photographers a lower commission knowing that those photographers have no better options outside of what Getty can offer since it would control 75% of the market.

Speaking to Artnet, photojournalist Angus Mordant says that this merger would “create a monopoly that only stands to hurt photographers” since “both Getty and Shutterstock have been notorious for leading the race to the bottom of the barrel with some of the lowest licensing rates in the industry.” These two brands coming together doesn’t seem like a recipe to reverse that trend.

But what Getty likely really wants is to control the vast library of images so that it can train AI. Getty is already fiercely defending its image library — it is suing Stability AI, makers of Stable Diffision, for “pure theft” of its image assets right now. The company likely sees the merger with Shutterstock as a way to dramatically increase the number of images it can train an AI image generator on to, eventually, replace a majority of its non-live-event-based photos with this AI-focused future big tech companies seem intent on spiraling us toward.

All of this is to say that should Getty succeed in its desire to merge with Shutterstock, it will just be the latest step in a race to the bottom that photography has been stuck in for some time now. Big companies seem to be salivating at the thought of creating an AI that it can sell because then it will no longer have to pay any real human for the content that is produced. They want pure, unfiltered profit and AI image generators look like cash printing machines to them.

As we’ve seen, AI is incapable of training itself. It must have real images made by actual humans to create content that looks remotely believable. It therefore makes the most sense for a company like Getty to amass as large a library as possible as soon as possible so that it can then transition to the post-photographer world that will generate the most money.

Regulators should reject the merger of Getty Images and Shutterstock.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.