Why the Getty-Shutterstock Merger Is Really About Who Controls “Real”

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority escalated its investigation of the Getty Images-Shutterstock merger to Phase 2 on November 3, 2025, citing concerns about “substantial lessening of competition” and potential for “higher prices” and “lower quality” content for news publishers. Three weeks later, Getty CEO Craig Peters told the Financial Times that if regulators block the $3.7 billion deal, “there’s parts of these businesses that probably don’t continue to invest in the UK. There are pieces of this business that potentially exit [and] ultimately investments that aren’t going to be made.”

Both sides frame this as existential. Peters argues the merger is necessary to compete with AI giants. The CMA, having heard “widespread concerns from businesses, trade associations and other stakeholders across the UK media and creative sectors,” including the News Media Association, which represents 900 UK publications, is concerned about market power.

But the real story isn’t whether two large companies should be allowed to merge. It’s what their convergence reveals about the collapsing economics of visual evidence and whether anyone is building the infrastructure that makes real images valuable before the last people who know how to create them find something else to do.

The Numbers That Don’t Tell the Story

Getty reported $939.3 million in revenue for 2024 and is tracking toward $918-936 million for 2025, with creative revenue continuing to decline 4.8-5.1% while editorial grows 4-5.6%. Shutterstock generated  $935.3 million in 2024 and is on pace for $1.02 billion in 2025, driven primarily by its acquisition of Envato rather than organic growth in traditional licensing. These are not struggling businesses.

The global stock photography market sits somewhere between $3.4 billion and $5.1 billion. The merged entity would control somewhere south of 40%: a significant concentration, but not a monopolistic stranglehold.

But market share percentages are the wrong lens. The relevant question isn’t “what portion of stock photography do these companies control?” It’s “what portion of verifiable visual documentation of events that actually happened flows through their pipelines?” That’s a considerably more concentrated, fragile, and economically distressed market than the stock figures capture.

What the Merger Is Actually For

Peters has been explicit. “This transaction is about taking a Shutterstock business that is in decline in terms of its licensing revenues and being impacted by AI, combining it with Getty and creating scale.”

Not two struggling companies, one profitable company acquiring another whose traditional licensing business is eroding under AI pressure. Even conservative modeling suggests generative AI could displace 5-15% of stock image demand, representing $232-698 million in annual losses globally. These aren’t failing companies yet. But their profitable present shouldn’t obscure their precarious future.

Shutterstock’s response has been to monetize the problem: the company made $104 million in 2023, licensing its content library to AI companies for training data, with projections of $138 million for 2024 and $250 million by 2027.

This is the new revenue model: selling your archive to companies building tools that will eventually replace the need for your archive. It’s lucrative in the short term: by 2027, AI licensing could account for a fifth of Shutterstock’s revenue. It’s also self-cannibalizing. Every image Meta or OpenAI trains on becomes ammunition for generating synthetic substitutes.

Getty has taken a different path. Its October 31, 2025 deal with Perplexity AI is revelatory. Unlike Shutterstock’s training-data licensing, the agreement provides Perplexity with access to display images from Getty Images across Perplexity’s AI-powered search and discovery tools, with image credit and link to source.

It’s a distribution partnership with attribution requirements. Getty isn’t helping Perplexity build image generators; it’s helping Perplexity prove which images are real. Getty is positioning itself as a trust layer in an environment where every image is potentially synthetic.

This is the strategic fork that matters. Shutterstock monetized its archive by feeding the machines. Getty is trying to become the referee that certifies authenticity. Only one of these models has a future past 2030.

The Editorial Crisis Nobody’s Pricing In

Getty’s editorial revenue of $345.9 million rose 7.9% in 2024, significantly outpacing its declining creative business. But that growth has stalled in 2025, with editorial revenue tracking roughly flat. Editorial, images of newsworthy events, and actual occurrences should be growing as their value increases. The problem isn’t demand for authentic images. The problem is that the buyers of those images are disappearing.

 

By 2024, the Associated Press was generating only about 10% of its revenue from United States newspapers, down from 30% in 2007. Nearly 300 UK local newspapers have closed since 2005. Magazine circulation in the UK dropped 12.4% in 2023.

The metrics are damning: In the UK, 96% of adults consume news, yet 46% actively avoid it, trust has collapsed to 35%, and only 10% are willing to pay for it. The industry dug this grave by overproducing clickbait for ad pennies, eventually overwhelming the audience to the point of revulsion. With the advertising model now cornered by Google and Meta, publishers are desperate to sell subscriptions. But this strategy is doomed by a simple truth: you cannot charge people for the privilege of drowning in a content glut they already despise.

Because publishers cannot sell subscriptions to nauseated readers, they have no budget to pay Getty or Reuters for premium verification, forcing the agencies to compete on price rather than truth.

 

The Invisible Infrastructure Problem

The UK’s editorial image supply comes from a narrow pipeline: PA Images, the global wires (Reuters, AP, AFP, EPA), and the stock/editorial conglomerates. PA Media Group generated £112.1 million in 2023 but doesn’t disclose what portion comes from editorial licensing. Reuters and AP don’t break out regional revenue. The systemic risk is unquantifiable because nobody will show the numbers.

The agencies still do extraordinary work: Both AP and Reuters won the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes in photography. But Pulitzers don’t pay bills. Major US chains Gannett and McClatchy both stopped using certain AP services in 2024. The infrastructure of global news photography is being quietly dismantled.

What should these agencies be doing? Racing to implement C2PA standards for every image at the point of capture. Building public provenance infrastructure that makes their content cryptographically verifiable. Positioning themselves not as fast commodity pipelines but as guarantors of authenticity.

Instead, they’re competing on speed and price while AI-generated imagery normalizes the assumption that all compelling images are synthetic until proven otherwise. By the time they realize provenance infrastructure was the only defensible moat, it will be too late. Someone else, probably a technology platform with deeper pockets, will own the verification layer.

Reputation alone won’t survive when your brand means nothing to audiences who get news from YouTube personalities and ChatGPT. While some experiment with C2PA image-authentication workflows and others field-tests in-camera provenance technology, they remain stuck in pilot purgatory while the window for implementation closes. The agencies that should be building the infrastructure for trustworthy images might end up watching platforms and phone manufacturers solve the problem without them.

The Double Bind

The CMA is trying to prevent a bad outcome, but structural fragility means there are no good outcomes available. We’re choosing between flavors of failure.

If the merger proceeds: market concentration, reduced competition, and the likelihood that publishers face a take-it-or-leave-it monopoly supplier. But also: the operational scale to maintain global event coverage, photographers at wars, disasters, elections, protests, that fragmented competitors cannot afford. And beyond, a thriving, human-generated, creative, original, and refreshed pool of commercial stock images.

If the merger fails: Peters’ threatened UK exit isn’t a bluff. Smaller operators will survive but become increasingly selective about what they cover. Reduced investment in expensive event coverage, fewer photographers at breaking news outside major markets, growing gaps in the global visual record. The slow-motion withdrawal of professional capacity from events that don’t generate immediate returns.

Both scenarios end with less comprehensive visual documentation. The merger preserves monopolistic consolidation but maintains the scale to cover the world. Fragmentation preserves competition but gradually narrows what gets documented to only what’s immediately profitable. The CMA can block the merger to preserve market competition, but it cannot fix the underlying economics that make comprehensive global coverage unsustainable without scale.

What Happens When Reality Becomes Scarce

Photography is evidence. A society’s access to trustworthy visual documentation is a prerequisite for informed civic participation. If you can’t verify what happened, you can’t hold power accountable.

We’ve already normalized the assumption that compelling images are fake until proven otherwise. “Pics or it didn’t happen” has become “pics and it still probably didn’t happen.” We’re in a Zero-Trust visual environment where every image requires external verification.

The scarcity isn’t in images; we’ll have infinite images. The scarcity is trustworthy images: pictures with provable provenance, verifiable chain of custody, transparent edit history, and accountable human authorship.

C2PA exists. Content Authenticity Initiative exists.  Fingerprinting and invisible watermarking are available. What’s missing is institutional commitment and business model clarity. Who pays for authenticity? How much? Through what mechanisms?

Publishers won’t pay more for verified images when they can get AI slop for free unless verification becomes legally required. Platforms won’t require verification unless forced to. Regulators won’t force it until the epistemic collapse is irreversible.

Everyone agrees authenticity matters. Nobody wants to pay for it. The infrastructure that could provide it languishes unbuilt while the organizations that should be building it argue about merger approvals.

The Question That Matters

The Getty-Shutterstock merger is a symptom. The disease is an information economy that values engagement over accuracy, speed over verification, abundance over trustworthiness. We made images cheap and facts expensive.

Now we’re discovering what happens when the economics of truth don’t work: truth stops being produced. The photographers predicting their own erasure aren’t being pessimistic, they’re being observant.

The CMA will issue its Phase 2 decision by April 2026. By then, the question won’t be whether to allow this specific merger. It will be whether anyone with the resources and capability to build provenance infrastructure still believes the market for verified visual reality is worth serving.

If the CMA blocks this, they aren’t saving the photo industry; they are handing the monopoly on truth to Google and Apple.

 

Main Photo by Amanna Avena on Unsplash