Freepik CEO – No, AI hasn’t killed the stock image market
Freepik began life as a stock photo website – alongside Pexels, Unsplash and even Adobe Stock, it became one of the go-to sites for businesses who wanted safe images suitable for websites and promotional materials.
But almost ten years is a long time in tech. Since then, the company has added AI image and video generators, scaling tools, and most recently Freepik Spaces, a cloud-based, node-based collaboration platform.
The not-so-long goodbye to image bank sites
At this year’s Freepik Upscale Conf in Malaga, I asked Joaquín Cuenca, the company’s CEO and co-founder, if the emergence of AI image generation had killed off stock images for good (and given the state of some of the overexposed images and the ultra-bright white smiles of impossibly beautiful models, I had some hope for a simple “Yes”).
“You started as a stock image site,” I asked. “Do you think AI has actually killed the stock market, or is there still room for it?”
Cuenca shook his head.
“No, there’s still room for that,” he told me. “It’s something that, you know, says that in the short term we overestimate the impact and we underestimate in the long term. Well, with existing platforms, there’s a tendency to believe that they’re going to disappear very quickly when there’s a new technology. But very often they stay stable. Maybe they grow less or they stop growing. But there’s a group of people who just like to create in a certain way. And that’s perfectly fine.”
Has Freepik seen a decline in stock image usage as it continues to add new AI tools?
“The stock, for us, has not decreased. It is absolutely stable or growing. It’s a great deal, and it’s been our business for many years. We’re very proud of it. We’ve helped many, many people with the stock.”
Will there be, I wonder, an increased convergence of stock, AI and photo editing software?
“We’ve done a little bit of that. We’ve made it easier to use stocks, combine them with AI, and a lot of people have done that. There’s a group of people who just use stocks, and it’s no big deal.”
There are also areas where stock simply cannot be moved by AI image generation, Cuenca explained.
“It’s like, for commerce, for travel, like if you wanted a photo of Malaga, it would be disingenuous to invent something. You just go there and do it, take a photo. It has its own use cases that are not supplanted by AI. And it’s very complicated, impossible to predict the future. But the reality today is that stay,” he said firmly.
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