Companies / Media library
Shutterstock
Shutterstock in the AI training data market. Recorded here: 4 disclosed licensing deals and 4 public prices.
shutterstock.comLatest record 17 Feb 2026
licensing deals
Public prices involving Shutterstock
- Shutterstock Data, Distribution, and Services revenue (library and metadata licensing, including to AI developers), fourth quarter of 2025, all buyers
Aggregate revenue of the product line that holds Shutterstock's AI data licensing, not one deal; the same line grew 16% for the full year 2025.
The payer's own page, Shutterstock Q4 and full-year 2025 results, Exhibit 99.1 (SEC)
$30.7 million, down $7.1 million or 19% on Q4 2024per quarter (all buyers)
- Shutterstock's 2023 AI licensing revenue spread across its 771 million image archive
Revenue per archive image across about five buyers, not a per-image price; the author puts it near $0.27 if only half the archive was delivered. What reaches contributors is a share of this.
Press report, Kaptur (Paul Melcher), The hidden economy behind AI: data licensing takes center stage
an average return of $0.135 per imageper image in the archive
- Shutterstock image-library licences to large tech buyers
Initial contract sizes; Reuters reported most were later expanded.
Press report, The Decoder (summarising Reuters)
The initial deals were for $25 to $50 millionper buyer deal
- Shutterstock Contributor Fund payout (AI data-licensing share), median per image in the contributor's portfolio, May 2023 payout, survey of 58 contributors
Side corrected from pay to licence: the fund passes on to holders a share of data-licence revenue Shutterstock actually received (its help page: 'a share of the entire contract value paid by customers licensing datasets', a 20% average royalty), so it is realised licence money per portfolio image, not pay for making data. Same survey: mean 0.0078 and top 0.0378 USD per image; one contributor told the CMA in March 2026 that their only Contributor Fund payment, in October 2025, was $5.35 on a 16,960-asset Shutterstock portfolio (about $0.0003 per asset).
Press report, Alltag eines Fotoproduzenten (Robert Kneschke), Analyse: Wie viel zahlt Shutterstock für KI-Trainingsdaten an Anbieter?
0,0069 USD/Bildper image in the portfolio (median of 58 contributors)
Licensing deals
- Jun 2024Shutterstock to Reka AINot disclosed
Training
- Apr 2024$25 million to $50 million each initially; most later expanded
- Dec 2023$104M a year
- Jul 2023Shutterstock to OpenAINot disclosed
Training
Cite this
AIData.Broker, “Shutterstock in the AI training data market”, reviewed 17 Feb 2026. https://www.aidata.markets/companies/shutterstock
Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 if you credit AIData.Broker and link to this page. Each row names the publication that stated it, and words quoted from a source keep that source's own terms.