If you’re unfamiliar with the latest image generation developments sweeping the globe, Midjourney is an AI system that creates images based on text prompts that we provide.
A simple descriptive prompt or sentence allows Midjourney to generate a diverse range of artistic images around that theme. Simple and a huge money maker, prompting competition on a global scale for similar services.
Midjourney is reportedly generating anywhere from $1,000,000 – $1,750,000 in revenue each month and has expectations for $200 million in revenues yearly.
Meager in comparison to OpenAI, the A.I. startup behind ChatGPT, which is on track to generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue. It currently earns around $80 million per month.
But it’s still astounding figures for Midjourney considering that we are talking about images, and not text content where mistakes are costly.
And David Holz, the 35-year-old CEO who founded Midjourney in mid-2021, has shunned venture capitalists who are seeking a chunk of the action and who funded top-tier artificial intelligence startups with over $17 billion in fresh capital in recent years.
Read: ChatGPT playing architect, designing buildings and other robots
Key stats for Midjourney
Midjourney currently has over 16 million users on its Discord servers, 1.5 million of which are online and active users. The site gets nearly 28.5 million visits per month. Over 15 percent of Midjourney’s users are American.
In June 2023, 57 percent of Midjourney’s social media traffic came via Discord and 27 percent via YouTube.
Midjourney has completed around 300 million tasks and attracts 90,000 new users every day.
Midjourney is being searched around 1.2 million times each month and went from 2.7 million members in September 2022, to more than 15 million by May 2022.
It took Twitter around 24 months to reach 1 million users. Midjourney attracted 1 million people in just 6 months after launch.
| Online Service | Launch Year | Time Taken to Reach 1 Million Users |
| ChatGPT | 2022 | 5 days |
| 2010 | 2.5 months | |
| Spotify | 2008 | 5 months |
| Midjourney | 2022 | 6 months |
| Dropbox | 2008 | 7 months |
| 2004 | 10 months | |
| 2006 | 24 months |
Using OpenAI’s Dall-E 2
Nothing wrong with using the competition to advance your own cause. OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 text-to-image generator has become the base for Midjourney to create AI art in a few simple steps.
Users can create digital art from their smartphones and customize colors and textures using the algorithm that powers Midjourney.
New Midjourney features
MidJourney, which has an annual subscription cost of around $100, released a feature called “Vary (Region),”. This new addition allows users to engage in inpainting—a process that edits elements within an image’s canvas.
MIdjourney has already seen success with its recent ‘Vary (Strong)’ and ‘Vary (Subtle)’ features. But the latest update teases the promise of a genuine AI alternative to Photoshop.
The Vary Region feature gives users the ability to select specific portions of an image they either don’t like or choose to edit and modify them using text prompts. The tool also offers the capability to add accessories to a portrait.
Stable Diffusion, a free, competing, open-source image generator has supported both inpainting and outpainting functionalities. Outpainting involves expanding the picture beyond its original boundaries.
This is further evidence of the competitive AI landscape where various platforms offer innovative or overlapping functionalities. The industry is driving towards more refined and user-centric solutions for enhanced creativity and customization.
Midjourney competitors
Ideogram is a GenAI image startup founded by former Google Brain researchers. It launched with $16.5 million in seed funding. It joins a slew of other image generator startups like Midjourney, Dall-E 2, Stability AI and Stable Diffusion.
But, Ideogram has a major selling point: creating reliable text generation within the image, such as lettering on signs and for company logos, in different colors, fonts, sizes, and styling.
Other competitors include:
Craiyon
Craiyon is an AI image generator that can draw images from any text prompt. The company, formerly known as DALL-E mini, was founded in 2022 and is based in Houston, Texas.
Regie.ai
Regie.ai is an AI-based platform for enterprise sales. The company’s software blends language and AI to create, test, and analyze personalized sales campaigns and offer sales, workplace, marketing, content management, outbound prospecting, inbound lead response, mid-cycle follow-up, and other solutions. It was founded in 2020 and is based in San Francisco, California.
Neural Love
Neural Love provides an online AI-powered platform for audio, video, and image editing and enhancement. It was founded in 2020 and is based in Estonia.
97 books in 9 months using Midjourney
Science fiction author Tim Boucher has used AI generator tools to publish 97 books in just 9 months. He manages to write his books in just 6 to 8 hours and one book took just 3 hours.
Boucher used ChatGPT (based on GPT-4) and Anthropic’s Claude for ‘brainstorming and text generation’ and image generator MidJourney for illustrating his novels.
For more tech news, click here.
