Shutterstock, Inc.
Headquarters
New York, NYFounded
2003CEO / Founder
Paul HennessyEmployees
1001-5000Funding
PublicStock
SSTKProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
7.3/10Website
shutterstock.com/
Profile updated
About Shutterstock, Inc.
Shutterstock, Inc. was founded in 2003 by Jon Oringer in New York, where it remains headquartered. The company operates a marketplace for licensed stock photography, video footage, music, and 3D models, serving businesses, marketers, and media organizations worldwide. It went public in 2012 and trades on the New York Stock Exchange.
Shutterstock's core products include its stock content library of several hundred million assets, along with editing and creative tools such as Shutterstock Editor. The company has expanded into generative AI, offering text-to-image generation built on licensed training data and partnerships with companies including OpenAI, Google, and NVIDIA. It also licenses its content library to AI developers for model training under compensation agreements with contributors. Customers include advertising agencies, publishers, and enterprise marketing departments.
The company has grown through acquisitions, including PremiumBeat (music), Rex Features and Bigstock (stock content), TurboSquid (3D models), Pond5 (stock media), and Giphy's non-social media business acquired from Meta in 2023. Shutterstock trades under the ticker SHUT and reported annual revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars, with a workforce in the low thousands.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Shutterstock, Inc.
All products by Shutterstock, Inc. reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Shutterstock, Inc.
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Shutterstock, Inc.'s product on their own terms. They landed within 0.4 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Shutterstock, Inc. competes with, and how they differ.
Runs the same licensed-media marketplace model as Shutterstock, sourced from professional and editorial contributors, and layers on AI generation via an OpenAI-licensed tool rather than an in-house model; the two companies tried to merge in 2025-2026 before UK regulators forced the deal to collapse.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Competes on two fronts: Adobe Stock rivals Shutterstock's licensed content marketplace directly, and Adobe Firefly is a leading generative image model trained on licensed Adobe Stock content, mirroring Shutterstock's own contributor-royalty approach to AI training data.
3 products reviewed on TopReviewed
Design-tool-first rather than marketplace-first: bundles a stock library with built-in AI image generation (via Leonardo.ai) inside an all-in-one editing platform, competing for the "create finished content in one place" workflow rather than per-asset licensing.
2 products reviewed on TopReviewed
Pure-play generative AI image tool with no stock library or contributor-licensing business; competes directly with Shutterstock's AI image generator on output quality via a flat-rate subscription rather than per-download stock pricing.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedBarcelona-based stock content platform with a large free tier plus premium subscriptions, similar to Shutterstock's freemium/paid mix, and has added its own AI image generation tools alongside API access to third-party models rather than an exclusive single-model partnership.
Company Timeline
Key milestones in Shutterstock, Inc.'s history, with sources.
- Milestone
CEO Paul Hennessy stepped down after collapsed Getty merger
Hennessy departed as CEO and board member effective immediately; CFO Rik Powell was named interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent replacement.
finance.yahoo.com - Milestone
Getty Images terminated the $3.7 billion merger
Getty's board voted to end the deal after the UK CMA required Shutterstock to divest its global editorial business as a condition of approval, which Getty declined to accept.
techrepublic.com - Milestone
Announced $3.7 billion merger agreement with Getty Images
Getty Images agreed to acquire Shutterstock in a cash-and-stock deal; Getty shareholders would hold approximately 54.7% and Shutterstock shareholders approximately 45.3% of the combined company, which would trade as GETY.
petapixel.com - Launch
Launched AI image generator powered by OpenAI's DALL-E
Shutterstock rolled out a text-to-image generative AI tool built into Creative Flow, powered by DALL-E and LG's EXAONE, with a revenue-share model for contributors whose licensed content trained the models.
petapixel.com - Acquisition
Acquired Pond5 for $210 million
Shutterstock bought the video-centric stock marketplace, adding over 30 million video clips, 1.6 million music tracks, and clients including Netflix and Disney.
petapixel.com - Acquisition
Acquired PicMonkey for $110 million
Shutterstock bought the Seattle-based web photo-editing and design platform in a cash deal expected to add roughly 3% to annual revenue and over 200,000 subscribers.
petapixel.com - Acquisition
Acquired Rex Features for $33 million
Shutterstock bought the UK editorial photo agency, founded in 1954, to expand into editorial imagery alongside its existing library of over 47 million images.
petapixel.com - Milestone
IPO on the New York Stock Exchange
Shutterstock priced its IPO at $17.00 per share (4,500,000 shares) on October 10, 2012 and began trading on the NYSE under ticker SSTK the next day.
prnewswire.com
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