Adobe Inc. is broadening its effort to serve outside the main clientele of design professionals to protect its long-standing industry control against growing competition from upstarts. The maker of Photoshop in December 13 launched Creative Cloud Express. It’s a suite of products making it easier for video meme creators to create graphics and other digital content. It is an extension of Spark, introduced in 2016 with a similar objective but more limited in capabilities.
“This is an interesting and important start of a long journey for the company,” disclosed Mr. David Wadhwani, Adobe’s chief business officer and concurrent digital media executive vice president.
Adobe is one of the world’s 30 most valuable companies. Plus, they’re the leader in the market for creative software. Their products such as Photoshop and Illustrator remain primary tools for graphic design experts. That authority has helped drive a tremendous stock rise of more than 500% in the past five years. Unfortunately, the software giant is under new pressure from closely held Sydney-based graphic design company Canva. At present, Canva is valued at $40 billion.
The growth of Canva is driven by the expanding market for design software beyond the historic professional customer base. A wider audience, including video meme creators, influencers, small business owners, and marketing executives, are now looking for tools to create content quickly. Users also want software that allows them to share their content on various platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Moreover, it is a market that Adobe is expected to reach as high as $41 billion in 2023.
These days, youngsters are three times more likely to say they want to be YouTube stars than astronauts, according to Wadhwani. He said there is a paradigm shift in how people engage over digital media and encourage them to create content.
The launch of Adobe’s new set of products come along with their acquisition of ContentCal at an undisclosed price. ContentCal is an answer to the changing trends in the design software market as well as Canva’s increasing popularity. The six-year-old UK-based social marketing startup allows users to collaborate, share, plan, and publish digital content to generate social media engagement.
Chris Ross, an analyst at Gartner, said that he is surprised that it took them a long time to do the expansion. He added that Canva had massively validated the design software market.
As previously reported by Bloomberg, Adobe will offer a free version of the new product suite. It will have pre-installed templates and a subscription option, including more tools. Users who have paid more than $20 a month for Creative Cloud, a set of products that includes Photoshop, can also access it for free.
However, crucial to Adobe’s revenue growth within this market will be the ability to convert free users to the paid version and into more expensive offerings.
David Wadhwani told Bloomberg is concerned about increasing engagement as they add features into products. If it does, then Adobe will double down. The company will grab this unique opportunity to start testing the functionalities and usefulness of Creative Cloud. Adobe has been experimenting with that already. In October, for example, the software maker introduced a test of a fully web-based version of Photoshop and Illustrator.
Let’s see what other values this new suite of products will add to help video meme creators in the coming months.
