Visual media giants Getty Images Holdings Inc. and Shutterstock Inc. today announced a deal to merge into a single visual content company with a value of about $3.7 billion.

The combined company will retain the Getty Images name and offer a content library that merges the portfolios of both firms including imagery, video, music, 3D and other media. The new company will continue to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the “GETY” ticker symbol.

“With the rapid rise in demand for compelling visual content across industries, there has never been a better time for our two businesses to come together,” said Getty Chief Executive Craig Peters. “By combining our complementary strengths, we can better address customer opportunities.”

Both Getty Images and Shutterstock cover similar digital content portfolios, licensing diverse collections of high-quality media. Getty Images maintains one of the largest and best privately owned archives in the world photographic archives with millions of images dating back to the beginning of photography. Shutterstock also maintains a massive global platform for millions of creators of digital content where they can market their works.

Getty Images stock rose 42% in premarket trade this morning after the companies announced the agreement.

Under the details of the deal, which was unanimously approved by the boards of both companies, Getty Images shareholders will own 54.7% of the combined company after closing and Shutterstock shareholders will own 45.3%.

Peters will serve as CEO for the combined company. The new company will also have an eleven-member board of directors, including Peters, Shutterstock CEO Paul Hennessy, six directors designated by Shutterstock, and four directors designated by Getty Images.

The merger between the two companies was driven by the looming advance of generative artificial intelligence, which depends heavily on massive amounts of fresh human-generated data. Getty Images and Shutterstock have dipped their toes into generative AI-powered art and established AI capabilities on their platforms.

Shutterstock partnered with OpenAI in 2021 and integrated the DALL-E AI image generator a year later. Getty Images added an AI tool on its iStock website for creating commercially safe AI-generated images in October.

The AI generator market was estimated at $8.7 billion in 2024 according to market analysis firm MarketsAndMarkets and is projected to reach $60.8 billion by 2030. Driven by key AI companies building and training models on large datasets of images and video to create image, video and 3D generators and services, the market has been growing rapidly to serve a growing number of creative professionals including marketing, training, consulting and more.

Photo: Pixabay