Getty Images filed a prepackaged Chapter 11 petition on 21 October to put into force a recapitalisation its lenders had already signed, and the plan it implements cancels all of the company's Class A common stock with no recovery for current holders. What is odd about the filing is the business sitting underneath it. In the quarter ended 30 June, Getty's revenue fell 2.5% to $229.1m, its gross margin improved almost five percentage points to 70.2%, and the company earned $32.4m of operating income.

The visual-content libraries have been priced for two years as the clearest casualties of image generators, and the late-October record splits them on exactly that question. Getty's accounts describe a licensing operation that still turns pictures into profit, carrying about $2.1bn of debt that consumed every dollar of it. Shutterstock's accounts describe the substitution itself.

What killed Getty sat below the operating line

For the full year 2025 Getty posted $231.5m of operating income, a 23.6% margin and up 28% on the prior year, and still reported a $206.1m net loss. The June quarter repeated the shape: positive operating income, a net loss of $86.3m, roughly $119m of distance between the two.

The restructuring support agreement is dated 12 October, backed by holders of all revolving loans and more than two-thirds of the term loans and notes. The Getty family and Koch Equity Development committed up to $533m of new equity and will own 100% of a privately held reorganised company; unsecured bondholders agreed to retire $270m of notes. "Today's filing is a procedural step to implement the financial restructuring previously announced," chief executive Craig Peters said on 21 October. "This process addresses our capital structure and certain non-operating liabilities."

The listing had already ended. The New York Stock Exchange notified Getty on 29 September that it would begin delisting proceedings for an abnormally low selling price and suspended trading immediately; the shares moved to the over-the-counter Pink market the next day. On 30 October the stub fell 36.7% to $0.019, leaving $8.3m of equity value against $981.3m of 2025 revenue. No Getty disclosure carries that date, and the likelier reading is continued liquidation of an interest the plan has already written to zero.

Getty's catalogue is weakening, but in customers rather than usage: 240,000 active annual subscribers at 30 June against 321,000 a year earlier, while paid downloads over the same twelve months fell only 2.8% to 90m and subscriber revenue retention slipped to 88.4% from 93.4%. "Our second quarter results reflected continued pressure in Agency and iStock e-commerce, while the larger parts of our business serving enterprise customers continued to demonstrate resilience and growth," Peters said on 10 August.

Charging model developers through the courts is not the alternative. On 4 November 2025 the UK High Court rejected Getty's secondary copyright claim against Stability AI, holding that model weights are not a copy of the training images because the model does not store them.

Shutterstock's downloads are the substitution case

Shutterstock's June-quarter revenue fell 16.9% to $221.8m, the third consecutive double-digit decline, and gross margin fell to 57.7%. The per-unit record is unambiguous: subscribers of 951,000 against 1,073,000 and paid downloads of 98.7m against 112.6m, with average revenue per customer rising to $292 from $266. A smaller base, each remaining account spending more.

The hedge is shrinking faster than the thing it hedges. Data, Distribution and Services revenue, 25% of the total, fell 16% to $56.1m, dragged by the data offering, down 11% in the June quarter after a 63% drop in the March quarter. The company also took a $173.7m goodwill impairment after its fair value fell on the collapse of the Getty merger, and attributed lower content revenue chiefly to weak new-customer acquisition.

At $4.14 the equity is worth $153m, below a single quarter's revenue, and forward price-to-sales of 0.195x sits above the trailing 0.170x. That inversion is the market marking the denominator down, with consensus revenue falling 23% this year and a further 8% next.

Founder Jon Oringer, chief executive until 2020, returned to the job effective 28 October. "AI is fundamentally reshaping the creative industry, and the pace of change is accelerating," he said in the 29 October announcement. The next day the company said it would not hold its 5 November earnings call while it "continues to evaluate its strategic direction and priorities"; the shares fell 6.1% on the heaviest volume of the month.

Two collapses, two causes

This corner of software looks like one story in October and is two. Getty's 78% monthly loss is a documented capital-structure event with filed terms, and its operating margin went the right way throughout. Shutterstock's much smaller monthly decline sits on top of a year in which the equity lost 83%, and there the income statement and the download count agree: the catalogue is being replaced, and the fees model developers pay for data are falling faster than the licensing revenue they displace. The software vendors, Adobe and Figma, both finished the month higher, with revenue growing 12.9% and 48.2% respectively and gross margins down roughly one and five percentage points as inference costs landed in cost of revenue.

Shutterstock will publish third-quarter figures on 5 November with nobody on the phone to explain them.