How Shutterstock Thinks About User Base Through Platform Partnerships

Editor’s note: This piece is part of our Columnist Network series, which explores the tactical thoughts and actions from Adweek’s community of high-level experts. Today, Shutterstock CEO Stan Pavlovsky discusses the benefits—and complexities—of platform integration for overall company growth. Below, in his own words, he lists the three key elements of Shutterstock's approach. The challenge We all know the mantra, “Grow or die.” As the CEO of a public company, I’m acutely aware of the emphasis our industry places on growth. While smart, manageable growth is a constant focus, it paradoxically becomes more challenging the bigger you get. Once you’ve optimized your media mix, how can you further advance your strategy and get your product in front of people fast in order to scale your user base to audiences who might not know you exist? The process You can approach audience development in two main ways. The first is to create a walled garden, or closed system, and work to build (and keep) your audience within that ecosystem; Facebook and Apple are paragons of this approach. The second is to be an open platform and make your product available wherever your customers are. We’ve taken the platform approach—and found that it works faster and delivers more value to our business and customers. Taking a platform approach means opening yourself up to partnerships and giving up a bit of control over your brand, which can be uncomfortable. To achieve greater scale, we have pursued native integrations, app extensions and single-sign on (SSO) agreements. Native integrations are the best way to grow your audience. These premium partnerships use APIs to put your technology, tools, product or service directly within the partner application so that discovery is built in. As any technology leader knows, it’s much easier to insert yourself into a user’s existing workflow than to get that user to switch behaviors (e.g., stop what they are doing and visit your site or application). We have more than 8,000 API integrations, including native integrations with Facebook, Microsoft, Hubspot and Wix.com, and the scale increase from these types of partnerships is astounding. They are the most difficult, since convincing a platform to integrate your product into theirs is a big ask, and your product has to have tremendous value, but once they’re complete—voila!—you have direct access to the partners’ whole user base. Now, when you build an ad in Facebook Ad Manager or create a web page in Wix, you’ll be offered Shutterstock imagery to include without ever leaving the partner experience. In the best case, the partner will also promote the integration to its users on your behalf, since it provides additional value to their customers. Another option, albeit less attractive than native integrations, are app extensions. They’re great because, like native integrations, they reach users where they are and put you in front of new audiences. But they’re a bit more challenging, since users need to seek you out. Just last week, we launched an app extension for Google Drive for Enterprise, which lets Shutterstock Enterprise customers access Shutterstock imagery directly within Google Workspace collaboration tools, including Gmail, Google Docs and Google Slides. The integration greatly reduces the amount of time people will spend having to search for assets, but they still need to activate the extension. The third model we have pursued to grow our user base is SSO integrations, which are best suited for our Enterprise clients. We did 100 SSO integrations last year; these partnerships are lighter-weight, requiring mostly front-end development instead of deep API integrations. With SSO integrations, you enable every employee within an organization to access your offering with their existing corporate account. Employees select the applications that seem most useful to them initially during onboarding, and then your application shows up every time they sign in, spurring repeat usage. The takeaway The integrations we’ve sought out are not without their challenges. Your tech has to work seamlessly within various platforms, which is no small task when you are working with external stacks and workflows. You’ll need to prove business value to potential partners before a single line of code is written. But in the end, it’s worth it. Not only have partnerships helped grow our footprint, but they have also helped us drive stickiness: people who access Shutterstock via platforms have much higher utilization than those who visit us directly. Over the years, I’ve come to realize you can only go it alone for so long. By investing in developing a robust API and taking a platform approach, we’ve uncovered a more efficient way to grow our audience.