Getty Images — BrandWiki

Getty Images

Overview

Getty Images Holdings, Inc.

type	Public
traded as	nyse: GETY
predecessors	Getty Communications PhotoDisc
founders	Mark Getty‡R1R‡ Jonathan Klein‡R1R‡
area served	Worldwide
key people	Mark Getty (chairman) Craig Peters (CEO) Jennifer Leyden (CFO)‡R2R‡
industry	Publishing · media · web design
genre	Stock photography
products	Digital images · audio · video
services	Rights-managed and royalty-free images, audio, and video
revenue	US$917 million (2023)
operating income	US$128 million (2023)
net income	US$19.6 million (2023)
assets	US$2.60 billion (2023)
equity	US$681 million (2023)
owner	Getty family (36.7%)‡R3R‡
num employees	c. ~1,700 (2023)‡R4R‡
divisions	Getty Productions
subsid	iStock Unsplash Photos.com
homepage	https://gettyimages.com/
foundation	March 14, 1995 (as Getty Investments, LLC.)‡R1R‡
location city	Seattle, Washington
location country	U.S.

Getty Images Holdings, Inc. (stylized as gettyimages) is a visual media company and supplier of stock images, editorial photography, video, and music for businesses and consumers, with a library of over 477 million assets. It targets three markets—creative professionals (advertising and graphic design), the media (print and online publishing), and corporate (in-house design, marketing and communication departments).

Getty Images has distribution offices around the world and capitalizes on the Internet for distribution with over 2.3 billion searches annually on its sites. As Getty Images has acquired other older photo agencies and archives, it has digitized their collections, enabling online distribution. Getty Images operates a large commercial website that clients use to search and browse for images, purchase usage rights, and download images. Image prices vary according to resolution and type of rights. The company also offers custom photo services for corporate clients. In January 2025, it was announced that the company would be merging with Shutterstock.[5]

History

In 1995, Mark Getty and chief executive officer Jonathan Klein co-founded Getty Investments LLC in London.

Acquisitions

Since its formation, Getty Images has pursued an aggressive programme of acquisition, buying up many privately owned agencies that had built up the stock photography industry, from small family-run firms to larger agencies. After getting it start by acquiring Tony Stone Images, in March of 1995, which formed its foundation, by 1999 it had acquired the online art seller Art.com; the sports photography agency Allsport; and the market leader in the Benelux and Scandinavia: World View (1996, from Bert Blokhuis, four offices, for an undisclosed sum); journalistic specialists Liaison Agency; Newsmakers, the first digital news photo agency; Online USA, a specialist in celebrity shots; and the Hulton Press Library, the former archive of the British photojournalistic magazine Picture Post. The Hulton collection was sold by the BBC to Brian Deutsch in 1988, when it was renamed Hulton Deutsch. Getty Images purchased the Hulton collection in 1996 and renamed it Hulton Getty. With the acquisition of the Hulton Library, Getty Images took ownership of the rights to some 15 million photographs from British press archives dating back to the nineteenth century. Hulton Getty also included photographs from the Keystone Collection, as well as images by notable photographers such as Bert Hardy, Bill Brandt, Weegee, and Ernst Haas.[27]

Getty has branched out into stock audio, music and sound effects, and also video with the acquisition of EyeWire and Energy Film Library.[28] Getty has partnered with other companies, including Slidely, for companies and advertisers to use the Getty Images video library of around 2 million videos.[29]

In 2000, Getty acquired one of its main competitors, Archive Photos of New York (a division of The Image Bank), for US$183 million.[28] The Archive Photos library was combined with the Hulton Getty collection to form a new subsidiary, Hulton Archive. Archive Photos was formed in 1990 from the merger of Pictorial Parade (est. 1935) and Frederick Lewis Stock Photos (est. 1938), two well-established US photo agencies. Their collections included archive images from The New York Times, Metronome, and George Eastman House, and works by photographers such as Ruth Orkin, Anacleto Rapping, Deborah Feingold, Murray Garrett, Nat Fein and John Filo.[27]

Further acquisitions followed, with the purchase in 2004 of Image.net for US$20 million.[30] On 9 February 2006, the microstock photo website iStockphoto was acquired by Getty Images for US$50 million.[31] In 2007, Getty successfully purchased its largest competitor, MediaVast, for $207 million. The acquisition gave Getty Images control of WireImage (entertainment, creative, and sports photography), FilmMagic (fashion and red carpet photography), and Contour Photos (portrait and studio photography). Getty Images also acquired other subsidiaries, including Master Delegates, which includes Isifa Image Service in Prague and Laura Ronchi in Italy.[32] In 2008, Getty purchased Redferns Music Picture Library, the music photo library built up by British jazz photographer David Redfern.[33]

On 23 October 2008, Getty Images announced their intention to buy Jupitermedia's online images division, Jupiterimages, for $96 million in cash.[34] The sale went ahead in February 2009; Jupiterimages (including the sites stock.xchng and StockXpert) is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Getty. Jupitermedia, now trading as WebMediaBrands, continues its Internet publishing business, which they didn't sell to Getty Images.[35]

On 25 January 2016, Corbis announced that it had sold its image licensing business, including the Corbis Images, Corbis Motion, and Veer libraries and their associated assets, to Unity Glory, an affiliate of Visual China Group—Getty's exclusive distributor in China. Concurrently, it was announced that VCG would, after a transition period, license, distribute, and market the Corbis library outside of China to Getty. Getty now manages Corbis's physical archives on behalf of VCG and Unity Glory.[36][37][38]

In March 2021, Getty Images acquired Unsplash, a free-to-use stock photography website, for an undisclosed sum.[39]

Copyright enforcement and controversy

Beginning in 2008, Getty Images has been the subject of controversy for its methods of pursuing copyright enforcement on behalf of its photographers. Rather than pursue a policy of sending "cease and desist" notices, Getty typically mails a demand letter that claims substantial monetary damages from owners of websites it believes infringed on their photographers' copyrights. Getty commonly tries to intimidate website owners by sending collection agents, even though a demand letter does not create a debt.

One photographer noted, "Courts don't like to be used as a means of extortion." In one case, Getty sent a church in Lichfield, Staffordshire, a £6,000 bill for photographs it used on its website, apparently placed there by a church volunteer. In this case, the church offered to pay Getty what it thought was a reasonable amount. The diocese's communications director said:

"Getty was not playing ball or following the normal litigation or dispute resolution procedures and [I advised the church] to ignore them. We don't deal with bullies; we deal with legal threats appropriately. I told [Getty] by letter that's what [the church was] doing, that we were not going to play, and didn't hear any more."

The Guardian described other instances in which Getty or other stock photo businesses dropped a claim when a website owner refused to pay and hired a lawyer. A law firm was quoted as saying, "Once we get involved generally Getty does back off."[46]

In 2009, Oscar Michelen, a New York attorney who focuses on such damage claims, said, "The damages they're requesting aren't equal to the copyright infringement," and "there's no law that says definitively what images are worth in the digital age."[47] He called Getty's effort to assess four-figure fines "a legalized form of extortion".[47]

In an effort to combat online copyright infringement, in March 2014 Getty Images made over 35 million images available free for non-commercial online use via embedding with attribution and a link back to the Getty Images website.[48][49] According to Getty Images executive Craig Peters, "The principle is to turn what's infringing use with good intentions, turning that into something that's valid licensed use with some benefits going back to the photographer".[50]

On 15 February 2018, Google Images' interface was modified to meet the terms of a settlement and licensing partnership with Getty. The "View image" button (a deep link to the image itself on its source server) was removed from image thumbnails. This change is intended to discourage users from directly viewing the full-sized image (though users can still do so using a browser's context menu on the embedded thumbnail) and encourage them to view the image in its appropriate context (which may also include attribution and copyright information) on its respective web page. The "Search by image" button has also been downplayed, as reverse image search can be used to find higher-resolution copies of copyrighted images. Google also agreed to make the copyright disclaimer within the interface more prominent.[51][52]

Copyright infringement lawsuits

In 2009, Car-Freshner Corp., makers of Little Trees, filed a lawsuit against Getty Images in U.S. Federal Court, Northern District of New York (Case 7:09-cv-01252-GTS -GHL).[53] Car-Freshner claimed that Getty Images had in its catalog photos that included the famous "tree-shaped" trademarked car fresheners. In 2011, Getty Images attempted to have the case dismissed, but its motion was denied.[54] In 2012, Getty Images agreed to settle by paying $100,000 to Car-Freshener Corp., but admitted no wrongdoing.[55]

In September 2013, Avril Nolan brought a $450,000 suit against Getty Images. Nolan claimed that Getty Images improperly used her image in advertisements portraying her as HIV-positive. She claimed the ad's depiction of her as HIV-positive (she is not) hurt her personal and professional relationships and caused her emotional distress.[56][57]

Getty Images

History

Acquisitions

Corporate ownership and management

Gallery

Copyright enforcement and controversy

Copyright infringement lawsuits

See also

External links

References

Claiming copyright over public domain content

Controversy over AI-generated art