Paul Hennessy
CEO / Shutterstock, Inc.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so a company with a library of more than 700 million images is a virtual encyclopedia of human expression. Over the course of the last 20 years, Shutterstock, Inc. has transformed itself from a small provider of stock photographs in a niche market to the world’s premiere creative platform of images, videos and sound tracks for small and large companies alike.
With a constantly expanding library of nearly a billion stock images and other digital assets, Shutterstock, Inc. today is the leading global creative platform for high-definition photographs, video clips, three-dimensional objects, illustrations, music tracks and vectors for transformative brands and media companies in more than 150 countries around the globe.
With its all-in-one platform, Shutterstock provides talented professionals from all backgrounds and businesses of all sizes with incredible content and a range of innovative features to power their creativity and illustrate their ideas.
And while the company has continually evolved since its founding in 2003, it is still looking to expand and adapt in an ever-changing market while integrating rapidly emerging technologies into its business model.”
At the forefront of that commitment to innovation and growth is Shutterstock’s Chief Executive Officer, Paul Hennessy, who was appointed to the position in July 2022 and who has since led the company into record revenues of $233 million and a 14 percent year-on-year growth in the third quarter of 2023, along with generating 28 percent margins of $65 million of EBITDA between July and September of this year.
“I believe the opportunities ahead are endless, and I’m committed to our strategy of building a full-service creative platform that delivers an exceptional experience for our customers at scale.”
Hennessy – an MBA graduate from Long Island University who had previously served as Chief Executive Officer for the online pre-owned car retailer Vroom, Inc. and CEO for the online travel service priceline.com, as well as Chief Marketing Officer of Booking.com, an internet accommodations provider – went on to say that he has long considered Shutterstock to be “a great company with incredible assets.”
“When I first looked at the opportunities, I couldn’t help but notice that we had built a library – an industry-leading library – of more than 700 million images, 45 million videos, 2 million music tracks and more than a million 3D models,” he said. “And not only is Shutterstock a great company with great assets and an impressive product suite, but it delivers great customer satisfaction. Customers come to us because we fulfill their needs and they come back because we do that over and over again.”
Hennessy said that with all that in mind, he recognized that Shutterstock could easily transition from being known as a stock photo company to being acknowledged as a global leader in all things content.
“My goal was to basically transform the brand and continue the transformation and innovation that the company had already been undergoing during its first 20 years so as to take a great company and make it even better,” he said.
To do that, he said that the Shutterstock staff is constantly asking its clients what they are looking for and how their needs are evolving over time in order to bring them appropriate technology to bear, be it through artificial intelligence, strategic partnerships or new types of features.
“My career in business and entrepreneurship has been driven by finding the most innovative, disruptive ideas and scaling them up to fundamentally change the status quo.”
In 2023, Shutterstock is projected to have total revenues of $882.26 million, up 6.6 percent from 2022, and for 2024, according to some sources, it is forecast to have revenues of $926.72 million.
“We’ve had a great 2023,” Hennessy said. “We’re a wildly profitable company that’s growing well. We just increased our guidance. We beat our previous guidance, and things are firing up on all cylinders.”
Hennessy said that, for the medium- and long-term future, he sees Shutterstock registering “continued momentum.”
“In leading the team at Shutterstock, I am combining technology, content, design, ingenuity and innovation to help bring the best versions of our customers’ stories to life – and harnessing the power of generative AI to do it.”
“We are a core content company, ensuring that our customers find exactly what they’re looking for and dedicating our teams to making sure that we take all of the friction out of the search for and the delivery of our extensive library,” he said.
Additionally, Hennessy said that in 2023, Shutterstock “uncovered this little $100 million business called our data business, which is the underlying metadata of our content, that is being used for machine-learning by the largest hyper-growers in the world.”
“You’ve seen some of the names, from Meta to LG, and we’ve got partnerships with OpenAI and NVIDIA. You name it, the largest companies are partnering with Shutterstock,” he said.
“That data business is an emerging business and there seems to be an insatiable appetite to train models. Shutterstock has positioned itself to be the source for model training, not only because of our extensive library, but also because of our approach.”
Hennessy said that Shutterstock has consistently “taken an ethical approach to AI.”
“Our approach is both contributor-friendly and customer-friendly,” he said.
Hennessy said that Shutterstock’s overarching theme is and always has been customer centricity.
“I’ve found that anytime a business is truly committed to customer centricity, you seldom lose your way,” he said.
“You tend to build a great business when you are radically focused on what customers need rather than what the organization has to sell. Part of our process is to meet with leaders from all the organizations every single week to hear exactly what’s going on across the company and understand our areas of growth. I spend a lot of my time ensuring that we are well aligned as a leadership team on what our mission is, what our strategy is and what our tactical priorities are in the immediate term.”
In short, Hennessy said that he sees Shutterstock’s core mission as “trying to bridge the gap between idea and execution through content that empowers the world to tell their stories.”
“As a result, we can prioritize those concerns, bringing in product and tech to eliminate or improve those issues and ensure that we’re driving the efficiencies that are available to us. And that’s evidenced by our margin climb: From 2019 to today, we’ve made a steady movement in our margin from 14.8 percent to 23 percent to 25 percent. And now we are running in the 27 percent to 28 percent margin. Our process is working. And in the end, we’re just trying to do the right thing for our customers all the time,” he said
