Adobe Stock is 10 years old this year, and, rather than dwelling on its achievements to date, it's celebrating by looking ahead to what's coming next.
Adobe Stock officially launched on June 16, 2015, as a curated collection of 40 million images following Adobe's acquisition of Fotolia for $800 million earlier that year. It's grown a fair bit since then and is now estimated to have 600+ million assets, including over 366 million images.
It's got no plans to slow down either, and recently published a blog post outlining its plans for future growth and evolution. Broadly speaking, these fall into two different camps: What’s ahead for contributors and content partners, and what’s ahead for customers.
Ten years ago, the primary method for contributors and content partners to generate revenue was to sell individual licenses for content. Adobe has recently supplemented traditional licensing by paying for content used in its AI models. As the company puts it, "When we realize we need more content of a specific kind, we offer select contributors the opportunity to contribute that content through Missions and receive an additional payment. We plan to expand Missions over the coming months."
The company has also just released its third Firefly Contributor bonus payment. While the amounts reported by users in forums are generally at the modest end of the scale — around $400 for 10K photos was as much as we could find — it's worth putting it in context. There are plenty of LLMs out there that are taking your content whether you like it or not and using it to train their models regardless.
"We were one of the first marketplaces to pay contributors for AI training on their content and believe it continues to be a promising new avenue of compensation as well as the responsible thing to do in recognition of our continued partnership," says the company.
It also says that contributors remain free to use any artistic medium they choose, whether it is traditional photography, video, audio, gen AI, or a combination thereof.
Expansion, basically. Adobe says it is expanding its Stock offerings to include photos, illustrations, videos, vectors, generative AI content, audio, templates, 3D assets, and GIFs. "We are just getting started," it says.
Alongside improving the quality as well as the quantity of the library, it also points to the Adobe Stock Premium content collection, which is reviewed and hand-selected based on the content’s quality, uniqueness, and rarity of the subject matter, as an illustration of the way it is serving its customers.
And it finishes on an intriguing note ahead of Adobe MAX next month. "We are continuing to explore powerful, new integration capabilities that will allow our creative customers to discover, license, and use high-quality Stock content directly within their workflows, tune into MAX on Oct 28—30 to learn more about updates coming soon."