Getty-Shutterstock, and Milkshakes

I’m very much like Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. You know that Daniel Day-Lewis movie about the oil man? That guy. Daniel Plainview and I are similar because we both love milkshakes and hate monopolies. Daniel hates Standard Oil, and I hate the merger in the works between Getty Images and Shutterstock . But, unlike Daniel Plainview, I don’t live in a world where monopolies like Standard Oil get broken up, this is yet another merger that’s bad for our market, and there is nothing anybody will do about it. But - there is a huge opportunity here, read on to see what it is!

Why is this merger bad for the market? In short, we’re all losing out. Buyers are going to see the price of stock images going up substantially, and the photographers (sellers) are going to be undercut by the platform even harder. And it’s not just stock images; I wrote an article about Shuttertock’s epic shopping spree, snagging up companies like TurboSquid and Giphy. Even distributors who used to on-sell your creative to several stock sites will suffer. The idea of creative output as a product will be a thing of the past because of this. Put simply, when a marketplace is controlled by one entity, you’re not going to be in control of your margins.

Hold on, is this a bad thing? Or is it even surprising? Creative as a product saw its end coming the day DALL-E Open Ai generated its own image from a prompt. In a couple years (if that), buyers will be able to use AI models to generate their pictures of people smiling in offices and have them look real enough to use. Getty and Shutterstock are acutely aware of this, and this is part of the reason for the merger, pooling their AI know-how to make sure people use their models. But, similar to Omnicom Media Group ’s acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG) , what we’re seeing here is two old dogs cuddling up for survival in the cold instead of learning new tricks.

The AI arms race is a losing battle. There are always companies ahead of you ( Adobe + The Brandtech Group ) and there is a giant 谷歌 -shaped elephant in the room that can flip the switch to making content, and it’s game over. The trick these companies need to learn is moving away from being a tool and pivoting to being a service business. The tools used to build in the Bronze Age will never see the light of day again, but the roles of designers and engineers are alive and well today.?

Here’s the opportunity. The world we live in seems scary for businesses, but we live in potentially the best time in history to have a service business. These giant mergers are leaving buyers desperate for companies like Stratia that are agile and effective and use all these brilliant tools being developed to get you what you need. And these companies are thriving.

So, for our new stock juggernaut, let’s hope their next move is turning their business around into an agile service-based company. Otherwise, they run the risk of becoming yet another outdated tool—albeit a very big and expensive one. And while I might not be shouting ‘DRAAAINAGE!’ anytime soon, we have a strong service model in an ideal market. So who knows? Perhaps we will drink their milkshake.