The UK’s competition authority, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), has announced that the proposed merger between Getty and Shutterstock poses a major risk to competition in the supply of editorial content in the UK and globally, warning that there was a “realistic prospect of a substantial lessening of competition”.
The merger was proposed in January 2025. Getty Images would acquire Shutterstock for £245 million in cash and 319.4 million shares in Getty Images stock. If the merger goes through, the new entity would have an enterprise value of over $3 billion. Given the CMA’s latest announcement, the two firms are going to have a bit more difficulty merging. The US Department of Justice is also scrutinizing the merger.
Getty and Shutterstock now have a week to offer undertakings in lieu of a reference to remedy the competition concerns. If these remedies do not sufficiently address the concerns of Phase 1 investigation, a Phase 2 investigation will be launched.
For those who are not familiar with Getty Images and Shutterstock, they own lots of stock media that you see all over the internet. For example, when reading the news online, many of the photographs used will be supplied by one of these two companies. Customers generally pay a subscription to continue access to the images in their libraries. With these two big players attempting to merge, it could give them an unfair advantage over the competition.
The CMA says that it has received many concerns from UK businesses, trade associations, and other stakeholders in the UK media and creative sectors about the impact the merger could have. Common concerns include increased prices, worsened commercial terms, and reduced quality of service or content.
Many of the stock photo companies have also begun offering generative AI tools that are trained on their licensed images to create new content. However, the CMA has found that despite this, they do not create sufficient alternative stock content for a significant portion of demand in the near future.
For those looking at this with a more liberal economic lens expecting new entrants to come in and disrupt the market for existing players to expand, the CMA said that it believes this to be unlikely to happen due to significant barriers such as restrictions on event coverage and investment costs.
This is not the end of the story yet, but we need to wait and see what the regulator decides to do in the coming months.