[HN Gopher] Following UK antitrust order, Meta sells Giphy to Sh...
___________________________________________________________________
Following UK antitrust order, Meta sells Giphy to Shutterstock for
$53M
Author : mirthlessend
Score : 233 points
Date : 2023-05-23 12:29 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| karaterobot wrote:
| Is there a handy list of companies owned by Meta? I had no idea
| Giphy was one of their properties.
| omneity wrote:
| Can this be seen as some sort of laundering or collusion?
|
| Surely somebody is making loads of money from an almost 10x
| change in price.
| pavlov wrote:
| The sale was forced by the UK antitrust agency while Giphy is a
| US company.
|
| I guess it's theoretically possible that Americans colluded
| with the British civil servants to scam Meta out of $350
| million, but it seems unlikely.
| tasuki wrote:
| > The sale was forced by the UK antitrust agency while Giphy
| is a US company.
|
| That sounds... strange. Would China or Russia also have an
| ability to force US companies to sell parts? Has Facebook
| complied because they wanted to maintain good relations with
| UK regulators?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| They could get penalized in various ways including being
| forbidden to do business in the UK.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| It was a court ordered sale, so it would seem that shutter
| stock is getting a deal that meta otherwise wouldn't have put
| on the table.
| ec109685 wrote:
| This still seems like such a random acquisition for the uk to
| have blocked. Giphy has plenty of competition and gifs seem to he
| waining in popularity anyway.
| airstrike wrote:
| It certainly padded some aspiring politician's resume, though
| calpaterson wrote:
| It was blocked by a quango, not by a politician.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_and_Markets_Author.
| ..
| giobox wrote:
| CMA isn't a quango - its absolutely a direct government
| org, established by Act of Parliament. Nothing "Non-
| Governmental" to see here, its run by the Department for
| Business and Trade.
|
| From wikipedia:
|
| Type Non-ministerial government department
|
| "A non-ministerial department (NMD) is a government
| department in its own right, but does not have its own
| minister. However, it is accountable to Parliament through
| its sponsoring ministers."
|
| > https://www.gov.uk/guidance/public-bodies-reform
|
| UK ministers (politicians) can absolutely influence the
| CMA, there is no vote on its leaders - they are simply
| appointed by the Business Secretary, who can pick whomever
| they find most favorable to their own objectives. The
| Business Secretary can be replaced at any time without a
| vote by the Prime Minister too in a reshuffle.
|
| The only real check on the CMA would be the UK's judicial
| review process, if a decision was especially egregious.
| calpaterson wrote:
| The CMA is a quango:
|
| > In the UK, the term quango covers different
| "arm's-length" government bodies, including [...] non-
| ministerial government departments
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quango
|
| > The Competition and Markets Authority [...] is a non-
| ministerial government department
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_and_Markets_Aut
| hor...
|
| But this specifics of what is and is not a quango don't
| matter. The original claim implied that the decision was
| made by a politician for political reasons and this isn't
| the case.
| airstrike wrote:
| Sorry, I meant bureaucrat, not politician necessarily.
| Still appointed by a politician, though
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > Giphy has plenty of competition and gifs seem to he waining
| in popularity anyway.
|
| Am I in a bubble? I post and receive like 20+ gifs per day with
| my IRL friends and family. The rate has shown no signs of
| declining.
|
| [EDIT] And what's _replacing_ them?
| onychomys wrote:
| You're not in a bubble, you're just old. The youths think
| gifs are corny and uncool.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| What are they into, tiktoks/instagrams (I'm still annoyed
| that I can't know if an instagram link is going to be an
| image, or a video, these days--it's for photos, damnit!)
| with captions? That's just gifs with worse UI.
| astrange wrote:
| Memes with JPEG artifacts.
|
| Sending gifs from TV shows hasn't been popular since 2012
| maybe. On Twitter it means you're attracting a horde of
| middle aged moms.
| SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
| TIL that I, a member of the youth, am attracting middle
| aged moms.
|
| In all seriousness, I completely disagree with your
| stance. My friends and I send gifs to each other almost
| daily.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| gifs are waning in popularity? Giphy serves up 10B gifs a day
| and Instagram now allows you to post a gif as a comment. Why do
| you say they're waning?
| giobox wrote:
| If giphy was doing so amazing, how does that explain the
| enormous write down today? Sure you can argue Meta overpaid,
| and there are some bounds applied by the regulator on how
| they could sell it, but I don't think that accounts for the
| entire gap.
| stonogo wrote:
| You appear to have confused "popular" and "profitable"
| ramesh31 wrote:
| $53M sounds like a rounding error for accountants at Meta. Why
| was this such a big deal?
| teacpde wrote:
| > acquired for $400 million three years ago
| mktk1001 wrote:
| Typical EU with its regulatory overreach. They haven't innovated
| in years and now milking American companies anyway they can.
| deet wrote:
| This is the second divestiture of an acquisition in two weeks by
| Meta.
|
| Last week they spun out Kustomer
| https://www.kustomer.com/blog/new-chapter-standalone-company...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| This was forced by a regulatory body. Strangely, it was forced
| _after_ the transaction had closed rather than blocked before
| closing.
| desas wrote:
| That's because Facebook didn't wait for the UK regulatory
| body to come to a decision before completing the acquisition.
|
| You don't have to tell the UK Competition & Markets Authority
| about an acquisition before it happens, but if you don't then
| you risk something like this happening. While an
| investigation is ongoing it may block some steps towards
| integrating companies and it gets about six months to make a
| decision. Facebook then spent a few years appealing and
| negotiating. Presumably giphy spent all of this time in some
| sort of limbo.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| For different reasons though.
| jt2190 wrote:
| > The announcement comes... after the U.K.'s [Competition and
| Markets Authority] issued a final order for Meta to sell Giphy,
| on the grounds that the merger reduced dynamic competition.
|
| > ... Shutterstock said it expects the deal to close next month,
| with Meta also signing a commercial agreement to continue
| accessing Giphy's content across its product suite.
|
| So, Meta still sees value in a Giphy they don't own.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Well, sure. They didn't want to sell. This arrangement lets
| them "sell" Giphy and still get the benefits of access to its
| content. Kinda feels like an attempt to end-run around the
| order.
| ffpip wrote:
| Meta already had access to it's content, the same way other
| social media platforms access Giphy's GIF library.
| pavlov wrote:
| Yeah, this commercial agreement just returns the status quo
| before the acquisition.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is a loss of somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 employee-
| years.
| smashah wrote:
| Great, now they should be forced to sell Whatsapp.
| airstrike wrote:
| The CMA's order for Meta to sell Giphy _after_ the transaction
| had already closed will go down in history as one of the biggest,
| most mind-boggling examples of regulatory overreach
|
| Their whole argument was based on the fact that Giphy was
| CONTEMPLATING expanding their advertising business to the UK so
| the acquisition could hurt potential, future competition. Give me
| a break
|
| https://www.klgates.com/CMA-Blocks-Meta/Giphy-It-Might-Be-th...
| mjburgess wrote:
| Presumably it's more to do with 50% of the ad market being
| meta, and 50% being google. Basically, the ad monopolies should
| be broken up -- so any acquisition whatsoever over any ad-
| supported platform is anti-trust.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| As far as I can tell, the watchdog and CMA started doing their
| job immediately when the news of the acquisition broke. Then
| three years of back and forth and legal appeals followed, and
| now Facebook has finally lost, as was expected three years ago.
|
| The original order for the sale came in 2021, after an extended
| investigation from that same year, following an initial
| investigation started June 2020, about a month after the sale
| became public knowledge.
|
| Giphy and Facebook didn't give the CMA an opportunity to block
| the sale before it happened, so of course antitrust action had
| to occur after the fact. That's not regulatory overreach,
| that's lack of a time machine.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Overreach is when antitrust laws are used to break up trusts?
| super256 wrote:
| Im curious why they aren't touching Tenor and Google. Isn't
| that constellation basically the same?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I wonder about that too.
|
| My guess is that when the Tenor sale happened back in 2018
| there were still enough of small companies that competed,
| Giphy being one of the last major ones to get taken over.
|
| I don't know if antitrust watchdogs can still start a
| successful case five years later, but I would be very happy
| if they could undo that sale too. These tech companies are
| big enough already, they don't need more power.
| elintknower wrote:
| wow, sounds like they sold off Giphy for pennies on the dollar,
| potentially at a loss?
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| The title in the article quite literally says they bought it
| for 400m and sold it now for 53m after a few years.
|
| The potential of a loss is pretty good I think.
| Eumenes wrote:
| $53m seems overpriced
| berkle4455 wrote:
| -
| detaro wrote:
| The UK is deciding what companies operating in the UK can and
| can't do.
| yalogin wrote:
| Yep makes total sense. I was shocked by how much they paid for it
| initially and could never justify that cost. 54 million seems
| more apt, but about 30 will be ok too.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| How is the UK dictating what US-based companies (Meta, Microsoft)
| can and can't do?
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Well, if those companies prefer to not comply, they can always
| cease to do business in the UK. Nobody is forcing them.
|
| What they can't do is operate in the UK, and at the same time
| avoid UK regulations.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Obviously companies must follow local regulations but I think
| it is a bit different when they regulate that one US company
| can't buy another US company. This has no direct effect on UK
| citizens. Of course legally the UK can do whatever they want,
| but philosophically regulating this type of behavior feels a
| bit more unusual and excessively overreaching.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > I think it is a bit different when they regulate that one
| US company can't buy another US company. This has no direct
| effect on UK citizens.
|
| Incorrect.
|
| What the UK decided is that this acquisition can be harmful
| for UK citizens, and in order to continue doing business in
| the UK, they must comply with regulation.
|
| This is actually the regulatory institutions of the country
| acting on behalf of the citizens instead of allowing
| corporations to freely pursue their monopolistic
| tendencies.
|
| There's no overreach here. Meta is free to tell the UK to
| just fuck off and ignore the regulation. But then they
| would have to stop doing business in the UK (and possibly
| later on the EU, that tends to be even stricter).
|
| These are countries acting on their own jurisdiction, and
| companies deciding that doing business in that jurisdiction
| is more profitable than keeping the acquisition.
| rsynnott wrote:
| In general, if you're a multinational, doing a merger, you'll
| want approval from authorities in the US, EU, probably UK (who
| tend to behave quite similarly to the EU ones), maybe China if
| you do business there. Where you're _based_ is almost
| irrelevant; if you want to do business globally, that means
| making yourself subject to a certain amount of local
| regulation.
|
| If this were not the case, it would be impossible to regulate
| multinationals _at all_; a multinational thwarted by its home
| country would simply relocate (this happens anyway at the
| edges; note that most of the giant gambling countries are
| domiciled in weird island nations, say).
| camillomiller wrote:
| Such a great week for Zuck!
| kastden wrote:
| How does Giphy make money? Does companies like Slack etc. pay for
| the integration?
| detaro wrote:
| It doesn't.
|
| The idea (pre-aquisition, afaik Meta deprioritized that) was
| letting companies pay to push their gifs. Since companies can't
| directly buy ads in your private conversations, giphy could
| offer them the exciting opportunity to push people to send ads
| in meme-format to their friends! (I wish I was joking, but that
| was their framing)
| dorkwood wrote:
| > Since companies can't directly buy ads in your private
| conversations
|
| Dumb question, but why can't they?
| detaro wrote:
| Because no messenger app (that I know of) offers that? For
| now, that's probably not quite palatable to users.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Turns out gifs and analytics tracking pixels have a LOT in
| common.
| generj wrote:
| Analytics tracking pixels normally ARE GIFs, specifically a
| 43 byte transparent 1x1 GIF.
|
| But most "GIFs" are not GIFs but rather Mp4, mov, or webm or
| some other compressed file format. Actual GIFs are extremely
| wasteful of bandwidth and not hardware optimized. The name
| lives on though.
| KomoD wrote:
| > Analytics tracking pixels normally ARE GIFs, specifically
| a 43 byte transparent 1x1 GIF.
|
| Is there a reason for this?
|
| And no, a GIF is a GIF, nothing else is a GIF, an mp4 is
| not a gif, webm is not a gif.
| SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
| you can say that, but the big gif hosting serve other
| formats with better compression by default.
| giarc wrote:
| If you've used Giphy, you may notice a ton of the gifs are from
| the CBC show "Schitts Creek". It seems like their media team did
| an incredible job clipping up the show and uploading a ton of
| high quality gifs to the platform. I'm reminded of the show
| almost everyday when searching for gifs. It's likely a
| (relatively) low effort, high reward piece of marketing.
| tootie wrote:
| Idk how they're business works, but I think more than few
| content properties curated gifs and possibly paid for search
| position.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| According to other posts CBC may be paying for that top
| placement
| furyofantares wrote:
| Enschittification
| andybak wrote:
| That's odd. I rarely see Schitt's Creek gifs. Maybe you just
| search for David-ish things a lot? :)
| giarc wrote:
| I'd say 80% of my gifs are either from The Office US or
| Anchorman, so you could be right!
| refulgentis wrote:
| Giphy's huge, way too huge for one effort to make impact, and I
| rarely see Schitt's Creek's photos. Confirmation bias? :)
| input_sh wrote:
| Just search for an emotion: confused, amazed, enraged,
| bitter, insulted, offended.
|
| For all I've listed, Shitt's Creek watermark is visible near
| the top. That said, it's not the worst one. While I
| experimented with such prompts, I've seen a lot more (HBO)
| Max watermarks, but they don't do show-specific watermarks.
| rchaud wrote:
| Not the OP, but I see a ton of Schitt's Creek "reaction gifs"
| on Twitter replies, which are usually embeds from Giphy. The
| most common ones are SC, reality TV, maybe the Office US.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I see Schitt's Creek and a few other shows, where a high
| percentage of the gifs have the same logo in the same spot
| and/or identical, fancy, pop-in captioning. They seem to be
| "official" gifs of some sort--I'd just assumed it was a
| pay-for-placement kind of thing. Also, sports gifs, where
| it's some player in their jersey saying something, often in
| front of a white background, and there are a ton of them
| and they all look like they were captured in the same shoot
| --identical framing, lighting, everything--and I find it
| unlikely ordinary users found some video like that and cut
| up _every single player 's segment_ into gifs. Those also
| seem like some kind of official effort.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I think that it's also to do with how visually exaggerated the
| four main characters on the show are. That style of acting
| leads to some great gifs that don't need context.
| jzb wrote:
| There's a few shows I've checked out solely because I've seen
| so many reaction GIFs and stills from them. ("Community" comes
| to mind.) If your show lends itself to the format, it does seem
| like a great way to market it.
| 7speter wrote:
| I'm trying to remember if it was giphy that if you search for
| Star Trek, 90% of the results are Star Trek Discovery gifs.
|
| I guess deals with a given id holder was one way to monetize
| this sort of service, and totally stifle the organic weirdness
| and randomness at the same time.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I think some of that may just be how _well-suited_ Moira and
| David in particular are to that sort of use. You also see a lot
| of reaction gifs using Lucille from Arrested Development, who's
| very much the same archetype as Moira.
| giarc wrote:
| Yes, but the format is very professional. It always includes
| the text, with some words emphasized in yellow. These are
| done intentionally, not just someone clipping a youtube
| video.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| And, critically, always have the little "Schitts Creek"
| logo in the corner, reminding the user where the funny came
| from!
| mwlp wrote:
| I find tenor's selection of gifs to be much better. I suspect
| Discord users are creating much of their content.
| zip1234 wrote:
| Tenor is owned by Google, which is all the more confusing for
| why the Giphy sale was blocked by UK regulators.
| airstrike wrote:
| I think the CMA has much more leverage / has been given much
| more power in recent years
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Google greased the right palms and Meta didn't perhaps
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| Meta got what they wanted. Dara on Giphy's users.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Was giphy uk based?
| WJW wrote:
| No, they're from NYC.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| You have to spend money to make money.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| Sounds like the SoftBank VC motto
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| No, SoftBank's motto is you have to spend $10 to make $5.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| I think we are all talking about the very same phenomenon.
|
| > Be BigCo
|
| > Buy something for lotsa money
|
| > Sell it for a fraction of the buying price
|
| > ???
|
| > Profit!
| prepend wrote:
| I'm fascinated by the economics of image sharing sites. They fill
| a fundamental need to share images across other platforms but
| they seem expensive to run and difficult to monetize.
|
| Have there been successful image hosters that weren't just
| spending money to capture users in order to sell out or
| eventually enshitten (imgur, giphy, imageshack)?
|
| Shutterstock is selling prints so it will be interesting to see
| what they do with giphy.
|
| I remember when Imgur started and they were really nice and
| seemed to be a low cost (I think only one employee) so they could
| host barebones without making the experience bad for users (ads,
| data mining, etc).
| dugmartin wrote:
| I'm sure its been done (I'm guessing many times) but my thought
| would be to have a free service that auto watermarks all images
| with the image hosts domain name and upsell a paid account that
| doesn't watermark images. If you get 0.01% paid and keep costs
| low by shopping around for CDNs I think it could be a good
| "lifestyle" business as long as you had some kind of auto
| moderation system.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| WhatsApp used to charge $1/year before the Meta acquisition.
| If you could convince people to pay $3/GB, that'd be enough
| to front the content with Cloudflare and store the data in
| the Internet Archive forever. Still need to solve the
| moderation problem, but it isn't impossible.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| If people are paying to host the material, isn't what they
| host on them?
|
| You could even have a lawyer add something like, "You are
| purchasing hosting rights for yourself and therefore take
| all responsibility for what you host. We will work with any
| relevant government authorities whose jurisdiction you are
| under to provide them information of your activities on
| this service if the products you provide violate local,
| state, or federal laws. You agree to post nothing illegal
| and if you violate that you agree to own all
| responsibility, legal, personal, or financial, for your
| posted materials... blah blah blah"
|
| And then submit everything posted to csam scanners.
|
| Wouldn't that be enough?
| notatoad wrote:
| > We will work with any relevant government authorities
| blah blah blah
|
| the problem is that costs money. you either pay the staff
| to do the moderation at upload, or you pay the staff to
| handle all the various governments that come after you.
| either way it's expensive, but dealing with the
| government's lawyers is probably more expensive. and no,
| just running through a CSAM scanner isn't nearly enough.
| [deleted]
| qingcharles wrote:
| Shutterstock sells stock photos. They have an excellent
| inventory and good prices and I've bought plenty from them in
| the past for web projects.
|
| _But_.. their business just went down the plughole with the
| advent of text-to-image AI. Now you can get pretty much exactly
| the image you needed without having to spend hours trawling
| through pre-made photographs.
| Anunayj wrote:
| And it's extremely funny since most of these text to image
| models were container Shutterstock watermarked images, to the
| point it thinks humans see the world with a big shutterstock
| watermark across it with certain prompts.
| duxup wrote:
| It seems like and endless Whac-A-Mole of free unprofitable
| services.
|
| Can this go in infinitely?
| somedude895 wrote:
| Rising interest rates are putting a stop to this. Finally.
| notatoad wrote:
| it will continue for as long as VCs allow it to.
|
| it's essentially just burning through VC money to provide
| free image hosting. every time the funders start trying to
| make their money back, somebody will start a new free image
| host funded by a new batch of suckers.
| hedora wrote:
| My guess is that someone will eventually end up creating a
| bootstrapped lifestyle business, similar to craigslist.
|
| Assuming they don't encrappen it, and there's some
| tangential thing they can charge a nominal fee for that
| rides their network effects, they'll have a lasting
| business that will provide ~5-10 people with comfortable
| income indefinitely.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder if adds will sell well enough, or if there will
| be enough paying customers to pay for the server and
| storage.
| notatoad wrote:
| i'm pretty sure imgur started as a bootstrapped lifestyle
| business. and that lasted a few years before they hopped
| on the funding train
| xyzzy4747 wrote:
| There's always speculative value because some executive
| somewhere thinks they can turn it around and make it
| profitable. So it can keep being flipped across different
| owners. It can go infinitely because the cash comes from
| elsewhere.
| lapufifarre668 wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| Rockjodd wrote:
| Not a general pure image sharing site, but one dedicate for
| wallpapers (and more) for your personal device (ie your phone),
| but Zedge did/still provides sharing UGC (user generated
| content) and as well a premium service for artists.
|
| They are in the margins of positive income at least last I
| checked.
| iambateman wrote:
| I think the promise of giphy was that advertisers would pay for
| sponsored gifs. So The Voice gets top placement for "wild
| crowd" gif and then gets shared X,000,000 times in a native
| way.
|
| It's a sensible thesis that appears to be invalidated for now.
| aklsdjfhaiuehf wrote:
| > appears to be invalidated for now.
|
| why do you say so?
|
| Advertising within the seller doesn't help "the ecosystem".
| (auditing, Ad networks, clearing house, more auditing, nsa-
| ish, etc)
|
| If facebook kept it and integrated on whatsapp (their only
| upward active user product) then they would sell ads there
| and that's it.
|
| With them forced to sell to a 3rd party, now that 3rd party
| will have to offer reverse auctions like every other
| publisher. Everyone will get their sweet stream of user
| profiles and "the ecosystem" will be happy. It is very much
| not invalidated now.
| petercooper wrote:
| I agree. It's interesting because nearly all the GIF searches
| I use on a regular basis are terrible, yet I wouldn't be too
| perturbed if I were given relevant/funny/interesting GIFs
| that contained product placement (say, a GIF for "cheers!"
| might be someone raising a glass of Coke).
|
| I think the problem might be that advertisers can't control
| context. Someone might say something vile (but legal) on
| Twitter and get lots of meme GIFs in the replies that
| advertisers would be very unhappy about, and it's a more
| direct connection than having your sponsored tweet appear in
| the chain.
| londons_explore wrote:
| A gif sharing service could provide code to the big
| embedders (ie. twitter, facebook, whatsapp) which scans for
| bad words and phrases and decides if a particular gif is to
| be suggested for posting in that particular conversation.
| If the conversation isn't advertiser suitable, the user
| just gets to choose from mundane non-branded gifs.
|
| That should be enough to satisfy most brand advertisers.
| stemlord wrote:
| I think giphy more tried to play the analytics tracking
| angle. They made it prohibitively difficult to right click >
| copy .gif url from their site seemingly so they could control
| sharing through trackable means
| zamnos wrote:
| Right. the reason why Facebook wanted Giphy was because
| they can use that to track users and develop deeper
| profiles to better sell ads to corporations. eg User
| searches for "drink", and chooses from a picture of Coca
| Cola or Pepsi, but chooses Pepsi. Coca Cola'll pay to
| advertise to current Pepsi drinkers.
| amne wrote:
| And this is exactly where IPFS makes sense for me. As long as
| the community wants something to exist it can exist for free.
| If only you want it to exist, host it. When you no longer care,
| it will exist until no one hosts it anymore.
| stemlord wrote:
| If this were the only option, I bet most people would realize
| how much of the web really doesn't benefit them in any
| meaningful way, but merely gets used because it's there, and
| can be removed from their lives with minimal grief
| nebalee wrote:
| Platforms are somewhat shielded from liability for user
| provided content. How does that work for IPFS?
| astrange wrote:
| Should be okay if you're in the US. I wouldn't want to host
| in other countries unless I was a lawyer.
|
| (Where "okay" means "you may get subpoenas you have to
| answer.")
| rickdeckard wrote:
| Shutterstock is selling images with license (!), that's
| certainly a more stable business model than "crowd-sourced
| image-hosting".
|
| Giphy seems to become a advertising platform itself, with
| advertisers using it as part of viral campaigns (i.e. have
| related gifs available when launching a movie), although I
| doubt that created alot of revenue so far.
|
| That said, it's striking how well-embedded giphy is across a
| huge amount of messaging platforms, which is likely their
| biggest asset today...
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Shutterstock is selling images with license (!), that's
| certainly a more stable business model than "crowd-sourced
| image-hosting".
|
| It definitely used to be one at least, but with the rise of
| automatic generation I wonder how well will Shutterstock be
| in the next 5 years.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| Was curious as well, so I looked up their last investor
| report. In 2022 they had 24% profit growth, with $32.8m on
| $215.3m revenue. They invest alot in AI image generation as
| well, and already offer a commercial product.
|
| For their big customers their product might be the best of
| both worlds: AI-generated images based on prompts, with
| full legal clearance on use.
|
| I doubt a marketing department of i.e. HP wants to risk a
| legal dispute about some image they used because it was
| generated by a model which was trained on unlicensed
| content.
|
| Once this scenario is legally solid though....yes, I wonder
| how well Shutterstock will do...
| ghaff wrote:
| Microstock was certainly a mini-rage for a while. All the
| photographers I knew who played with it got out pretty quickly.
| There was very little money in it (I played a very little and
| don't think I ever sold anything.) and a lot of classic stock
| photography of people requires model release forms.
| throwitawaylord wrote:
| Shutterstock does not sell prints.
| prepend wrote:
| Thanks, I confused it with Shutterfly.
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| Just remember the prices for AWS, CloudFlare, and GCP are for
| application software. Raw bandwidth are a lot cheaper when it
| comes to content focused CDNs and dedicated hosting.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Image hosting has to deal with the moderation problem,
| especially if it wants to monetize through advertising.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Side note, but how defensible is Shutterstock's business after
| the generative AI boom?
|
| I understand that Shutterstock's customers need royalty-free,
| high-res images with clear copyrights. Is the lack of clear
| copyrights the biggest hurdle to generative AI art adoption, or
| is the quality of the art itself the bigger hurdle?
| automatic6131 wrote:
| The people writing articles that are... appropriate for AI
| generated mush didn't buy stock images, and organisations like
| e.g. the BBC are not going to put uncanny valley images of
| hospitalness on the banner of their articles.
| detritus wrote:
| Funny, because I live in the world of designers and a lot of
| them see a very near future where generated images replace
| 'real' photographed stock, if some are not there already.
| ehnto wrote:
| It is already being used in commercial work. I know this
| from being in the industry, but I was also served an AI
| generated advertisement from a real company on YouTube
| today so it's in the wild too. It was a human talking about
| the product, you could tell it was AI by the way it reset
| it's face to the same position every sentence, and the
| stilted speaking. But it was honestly quite shocking, I
| could see someone not knowledgeable in tech being a bit
| weirded out but still convinced it was just a weird actor.
|
| It will be in a lot of advertising really quickly,
| advertising uses a lot of image and footage fodder for lack
| of a nicer way to put it. "Lady walking with smile" slap
| the brand assets on it, hide the AI hands, done.
| detritus wrote:
| Amusingly, I've literally just seen an example posted on
| a designer forum..
|
| https://i.imgur.com/Oqxaru6.png
| https://i.imgur.com/Vcp6JdQ.png
| artursapek wrote:
| You'll be surprised how soon AI generated images are
| indescernible from high quality stock photos
| andybak wrote:
| It's not as if stock photos represent some unreachable
| pinnacle of human creative excellence in any case.
| artursapek wrote:
| Exactly, it's not a high bar haha
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I can easily see AI generated background music replace
| all current background music.
|
| I would assume AI would also be good at formulaic stuff
| like jingles and basic pop music.
| dorkwood wrote:
| Stock images were also popular in advertising, since they
| were considered cheaper than hiring an illustrator or
| photographer. AI-generated images are cheaper again, and most
| people can't tell the difference.
| patall wrote:
| Heise, one of the most reputable and in-depth tech publishers
| in Germany is using them. Mostly for articles where an image
| doesn't add much (like generic battery image in a text about
| new battery tech), but still. Possibly because images
| increase engagement
| ghaff wrote:
| There are a lot of cases where a pub wants a graphic or
| image (perhaps depending on the pub's style), just about
| any graphic or image. Yes, for example, people are probably
| more likely to click on a social media link with an image.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think there are a couple answers:
|
| - Quality is still pretty big. And if I have to spend hours
| prompt engineering, is it really a win?
|
| - That said, there is some copyright murkiness and I probably
| wouldn't use generative AI in a marketing campaign as a large
| company. A lot of more incidental use like conference
| presentations, I wouldn't worry too much.
| echelon wrote:
| Coca Cola already used Stable Diffusion in a big ad. (Most of
| it is still digital artists, but it's getting into the
| workflow.)
|
| https://analyticsdrift.com/coca-colas-generative-ai-
| advertis...
|
| Coca Cola is also getting in on UGC GenAI and trying to
| engage customers in participating.
|
| GenAI in ads is going to be huge.
| ghaff wrote:
| For the near-term getting into the workflow is probably the
| key term. I'm hopeless with drawing but, for someone
| skilled with Photoshop and art generally, I can absolutely
| see getting generative AI output and then spending some
| time manipulating especially with all the new Photoshop ML
| tools.
| a13o wrote:
| I think they're well positioned. The winners of the generative
| AI space will be players with lots of copyrighted content.
| Shutterstock was already top of mind, and purchasing rights to
| all the images in Giphy strengthens their claim.
|
| There's two paths. Either copyright claims lock down training,
| and Shutterstock now licenses their training dataset to
| companies; or generative art trained on open images lose their
| novelty (think Comic Sans but for photos) and Shutterstock
| gains an upper hand by having an existing pipeline of novel
| images to train with.
| throwitawaylord wrote:
| 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.
| throwitawaylord wrote:
| [dead]
| Stevvo wrote:
| You can probably answer your question by using
| shutterstock.com; generative AI is one click away from the
| stock image library.
| randomcarbloke wrote:
| that seems counterproductive.
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