Shutterstock is an online marketplace for licensed creative content — stock images, video footage, music, and 3D models. Customers including brands, agencies, media companies, and individual creators search, license, and download content for use in marketing materials, social media, film, and other creative projects. Content is contributed by a global network of photographers, videographers, and other creators, who earn royalties each time their work is downloaded. Shutterstock serves over 3.5 million customers in 150+ countries, with most customers self-serving through Shutterstock's digital properties. Larger customers with specialized licensing needs are served by a direct sales force. Shutterstock organizes revenue into two buckets: Content (~79% of revenue), which covers image, video, music, and generative AI licenses sold under the flagship brand and several sub-brands including Pond5, TurboSquid, and PremiumBeat; and Data, Distribution & Services (~21%), which covers AI training data licensing, the Giphy GIF platform, and Shutterstock Studios custom content production. Customers purchase content through subscriptions (fixed downloads per period) or transactional licenses (pay-per-download). The content business is a marketplace with network effects — a larger library attracts more customers, which attracts more contributors, which expands the library further. The Data segment monetizes Shutterstock's existing content library as AI training data, a high-growth area driven by demand from technology companies for ethically sourced training datasets. In January 2025, Shutterstock announced a merger-of-equals with Getty Images, which has been approved by both companies' shareholders but remains pending regulatory clearance from the U.S. DOJ and UK CMA.