22 Jun 2015 Shutterstock Pushes Further into Getty Territory with Exclusive Penske Deal

Today, Shutterstock announced a new strategic alliance with Penske Media that’s aimed at cutting a significant slice of the market for celebrity & entertainment editorial stock photography away from Getty Images.

Penske Media Corporation (PMC) is a big conglomerate of 22 digital publishing brands – including Variety and WWD – producing their own original content from their insider access and event exclusivity to top entertainment industry’s galas, as well as from the over 50 Hollywood-related conferences, meetings and summits they produce each year. They’re a globally positioned entertainment orientated publishing company, with presence in 160 countries and reaching an audience of 168 million people monthly.

From 2016 onwards, all archived and newly created images and videos produced by PMC will be licensed by Shutterstock worldwide, initially through Rex Features and Shutterstock Premier. While PMC will retain ownership of all content, Shutterstock receives fully exclusive licensing rights.

In the press release, they state this partnership will change the ways of production for editorial stock photography in fashion and entertainment, by joining the perks of an established digital marketplace and the access to closed, top-class events to deliver new, constant and exclusive images on a highly marketable topic.

Whether it be so or not, it is clear that this is a big step forward for Shutterstock in its efforts to gain a larger chunk of the pie Getty Images has been dominating for years.

They have already made some moves in this direction, like the launching of the Offset midstock collection back in 2013. Adding a whole exclusive, high quality catalog of celebrity editorial is surely a measure towards competition with the traditional stock giant for a sector of the market in which microstock has, in general, not had strong presence so far.