r/investing
Thoughts on the Getty Images/OpenAI deal this morning
Getty's 200% surge on the OpenAI deal reflects market desperation for AI licensing proof, not actual disclosed revenue.
- Market values the mere existence of a negotiated AI licensing relationship as option value.
- Proves that major content owners can successfully negotiate licensed access with AI companies.
- The deal lacks disclosed financial terms, making it hard to value as actual revenue.
- Big Tech acts as gatekeepers, controlling both traffic reduction and payment infrastructure.
Getty Images jumped 200% this morning on an OpenAI deal. The announcement didn't include a single dollar figure.
No annual minimum. No per-query fee. No revenue share. No training terms. Just a multi-year agreement that puts Getty's licensed content into ChatGPT search and discovery experiences.
The market celebrated anyway.
That's the actual story. Not that Getty got a huge check, we don't know that. The story is that the market is so starved for proof that AI companies will negotiate licensed access at all that merely proving the existence of a negotiated relationship repriced the stock dramatically.
Getty didn't publish a rate card. Getty proved there might be a rate card. That distinction matters.
There are three data points worth putting together right now.
Getty is the existence proof, a major content owner got OpenAI to acknowledge that licensed access has value, without disclosing what that value is. The market treated the relationship itself as valuable. That's option value, not revenue.
News Corp is the only visible benchmark. Meta's AI content deal with News Corp was reported at up to $50 million per year covering WSJ, New York Post, and other News Corp brands. That number matters because it turns AI content licensing from a concept into a budget line. One toll posted on one bridge.
USA Today appears to be living in the messy middle, AI licensing revenue described as a blend of fixed fees and volatile usage-based payments tied to external AI platform demand. That's harder to forecast and harder to value, which is why it hasn't moved a stock price the way Getty did.
Here's what connects all three to something bigger.
The Open Markets Institute published a report this year called "Same Gatekeepers, New Tollbooths." The argument: the same companies whose AI products are reducing publisher referral traffic are also building the infrastructure through which publishers might eventually get paid. Big Tech is occupying both sides of the value chain simultaneously.
That is the uncomfortable version of the Getty story. The gate might be valuable. But who controls the gate matters as much as whether the gate exists.
And this isn't only a publishing problem. In enterprise software right now, SAP wants AI agents to come through Joule. Salesforce wants external agents to call deterministic actions through Headless 360. ServiceNow wants agents to act through governed workflows with an audit trail. None of them have published a comparable rate card either.
Content licensing and enterprise software are facing the same structural hole at the same time. The old internet priced humans, seats, clicks, subscriptions, pageviews. The AI internet has to price machine access, retrievals, actions, answers, agent-mediated outcomes. Nobody has a stable unit of value yet.
When Getty announced a deal with no visible price, the market didn't see missing information. It saw a gate.
In a world full of agents looking for content, a gate might be the most valuable thing you can own. Whether the toll that gets posted on it is transformative or modest is the question the 200% move assumed away.
Ai slop
I worked \_with\_ Getty for many years and to this day I have no idea how they actually make money. I mean I know precisely what they do and what they sell, I mean I don't know how they actually make money doing it. They single handedly destroyed the stock photography market by buying up all the smaller stock houses and instead of increasing the licensing fees that one would do when you had a monopoly - they went the other way and continued to reduce the licensing rates.
In the beginning back in the early 00's my 50/50 split for a double truck (two page magazine photo) would have been $1000. By the time I severed my contract in the early 10's, that same royalty was $1.27. They didn't keep the other $1998.73, they were just letting the images go for \~$2.50 through their flat rate a la carte subscriptions.
They had all the leverage in the world to be a money generator and the flat out fucked it up. Now their main threat (if you've sniffed around through a few magazines) is actually AI generated images. So what do they do? They sign this deal where they'll feed images to OpenAI. Brilliant.
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Fell