Getty Images
Encyclopedia
Getty Images, Inc. is a stock photo agency
, based in Seattle, Washington
, USA. It is a supplier of stock images for business and consumers with an archive of 80 million still images and illustrations and more than 50,000 hours of stock film footage. 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 has distribution offices around the world and capitalizes on the Internet
and CD-ROM
collections for distribution. As Getty has acquired other older photo agencies and archives, it has digitised
their collections, enabling online distribution. Getty Images now operates a large commercial website
which allows clients to search and browse for images, purchase usage rights and download images. Costs of images vary according to the chosen resolution
and type of rights associated with each image. The company also offers custom photo services for corporate clients.
and Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Klein
co-founded Getty Investments LLC. Mark Getty
is the company's chairman.
In September 1997, Getty Communications, as it was called at the time, merged with PhotoDisc, Inc.
to form Getty Images.
In April 2003 Getty Images entered into a partnership with Agence France-Presse
(AFP) to market each other's images.
Getty Images acquired the Michael Ochs Archives in February 2007. The Michael Ochs Archives were described by The New York Times
as "the premier source of musician photography in the world".
In 2008, the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman
acquired Getty Images.
In 2009, Flickr
announced a partnership with Getty Images in which specially selected users could submit photographs for stock photography
usage and receive payment. In 2010 this was changed so that users could label images as suitable for stock use themselves.
, buying up many privately owned agencies that had built up the stock photography industry, from small family-run firms to larger agencies. By 1999 it had acquired one of the largest agencies, Tony Stone Images; the online art seller Art.com; the sports photography agency Allsport
; the journalistic specialists Liaison Agency; Newsmakers the first digital news photo agency; Online USA, a specialist in celebrity shots; and the Hulton Picture 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. In 1996, the Hulton collection was sold on once more, this time purchased by Getty Images and renamed Hulton Getty. With the acquisition of the Hulton library, Getty Images took ownership of the rights to some 15 million photographs from the British press archives dating back to the Nineteenth Century. Hulton Getty also included photographs from the Keystone Collection
, as well as images by notable photogaphers such as Bert Hardy
, Bill Brandt
, Weegee
and Ernst Haas
.
Getty also branched out into stock audio and video with the acquisition of EyeWire and Energy Film Library.
In 2000, Getty acquired one of its main competitors, Archive Photos of New York (a division of The Image Bank), for US$183 million. The Archive Photos library was combined with the Hulton Getty collection to form a new subsidiary, Hulton Archive. Archive Photos had been 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
, Deborah Feingold, Murray Garrett, Nat Fein
and John Filo
.
Further acquisitions followed, with the purchase in 2004 of image.net for $20 million USD. On February 9, 2006, the microstock
photo website iStockphoto
was acquired by Getty Images for $50 million USD. In 2007, Getty successfully purchased its largest competitor, MediaVast, for $207 million. The acquisition meant that Getty Images gained control of WireImage (Entertainment, creative, and sports photography), FilmMagic (fashion and red carpet photography), Contour Photos (portrait and studio photography). Getty Images also acquired a host of other subsidiaries including "Master Delegates" who include: Gallo Images in Johannesburg
, Touchline Photo in Cape Town
, Isifa Image Service
in Prague
, Laura Ronchi in Italy
On October 23, 2008, Getty Images announced their intention to buy Jupitermedia
's online images division, Jupiterimages, for $96 million in cash. The sale went ahead in February 2009; Jupiterimages (including the sites stock.xchng
and StockXpert) is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Getty, while Jupitermedia, now trading as WebMediaBrands, continues its internet publishing business which was not sold to Getty Images.
In December 2008, it was announced that Getty Images was acquiring Redferns Music Picture Library, the London-based music photography collection.
in a transaction valued at an estimated US$2.4 billion.
On July 2, 2008, Getty Images announced the completion of its acquisition by the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman. Getty Images common stock ceased trading on the New York Stock Exchange
at the close of the acquisition and was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.
, Staffordshire
, was faced with a £6,000 bill for photographs used on its website, apparently placed there by a church volunteer. However, Getty rarely if ever issues court proceedings, instead relying on debt collection agencies to enforce its claims.
Stock photography
Stock photography is the supply of photographs licensed for specific uses. It is used to fulfill the needs of creative assignments instead of hiring a photographer. Today, stock images can be presented in searchable online databases. They can be purchased and delivered online...
, based in Seattle, Washington
Seattle, Washington
Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...
, USA. It is a supplier of stock images for business and consumers with an archive of 80 million still images and illustrations and more than 50,000 hours of stock film footage. 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 has distribution offices around the world and capitalizes on the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
and CD-ROM
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....
collections for distribution. As Getty has acquired other older photo agencies and archives, it has digitised
Digitizing
Digitizing or digitization is the representation of an object, image, sound, document or a signal by a discrete set of its points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a digital image, for the object, and digital form, for the signal...
their collections, enabling online distribution. Getty Images now operates a large commercial website
Electronic commerce
Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, eCommerce or e-comm, refers to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. However, the term may refer to more than just buying and selling products online...
which allows clients to search and browse for images, purchase usage rights and download images. Costs of images vary according to the chosen resolution
Image resolution
Image resolution is an umbrella term that describes the detail an image holds. The term applies to raster digital images, film images, and other types of images. Higher resolution means more image detail....
and type of rights associated with each image. The company also offers custom photo services for corporate clients.
History
In 1993, Mark GettyMark Getty
Mark Getty , is a British businessman. A member of a family which originally made its money from oil, he is the son of American-British billionaire philanthropist Sir Paul Getty.-Career:...
and Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Klein
Jonathan Klein (Getty Images)
thumb|rightJonathan Klein is Chief Executive Officer of Getty Images, Inc., the company he co-founded with Chairman Mark Getty in March 1995. Klein has led the development and implementation of Getty Images’ strategic direction for more than a decade. Before founding Getty Images, Klein led the...
co-founded Getty Investments LLC. Mark Getty
Mark Getty
Mark Getty , is a British businessman. A member of a family which originally made its money from oil, he is the son of American-British billionaire philanthropist Sir Paul Getty.-Career:...
is the company's chairman.
In September 1997, Getty Communications, as it was called at the time, merged with PhotoDisc, Inc.
PhotoDisc
PhotoDisc, Inc. based in Seattle, was a leading publisher of digital stock photography free of royalties. It was founded in 1991 by Mark Torrance, who also became the chief executive officer and chairman...
to form Getty Images.
In April 2003 Getty Images entered into a partnership with Agence France-Presse
Agence France-Presse
Agence France-Presse is a French news agency, the oldest one in the world, and one of the three largest with Associated Press and Reuters. It is also the largest French news agency. Currently, its CEO is Emmanuel Hoog and its news director Philippe Massonnet...
(AFP) to market each other's images.
Getty Images acquired the Michael Ochs Archives in February 2007. The Michael Ochs Archives were described by The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
as "the premier source of musician photography in the world".
In 2008, the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman
Hellman & Friedman
Hellman & Friedman is a private equity firm, founded in 1984 by Warren Hellman and Tully Friedman, that makes investments primarily through leveraged buyouts and minority growth capital investments....
acquired Getty Images.
In 2009, Flickr
Flickr
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
announced a partnership with Getty Images in which specially selected users could submit photographs for stock photography
Stock photography
Stock photography is the supply of photographs licensed for specific uses. It is used to fulfill the needs of creative assignments instead of hiring a photographer. Today, stock images can be presented in searchable online databases. They can be purchased and delivered online...
usage and receive payment. In 2010 this was changed so that users could label images as suitable for stock use themselves.
Acquisitions
Since its formation, Getty Images has pursued an aggressive programme of acquisitionTakeover
In business, a takeover is the purchase of one company by another . In the UK, the term refers to the acquisition of a public company whose shares are listed on a stock exchange, in contrast to the acquisition of a private company.- Friendly takeovers :Before a bidder makes an offer for another...
, buying up many privately owned agencies that had built up the stock photography industry, from small family-run firms to larger agencies. By 1999 it had acquired one of the largest agencies, Tony Stone Images; the online art seller Art.com; the sports photography agency Allsport
Allsport
The Allsport photography agency was started in 1968 by sports photographer Tony Duffy. It grew to become arguably the most highly respected sport photo agency in the world, and its photographers won numerous awards until acquisition by Getty Images in 1998....
; the journalistic specialists Liaison Agency; Newsmakers the first digital news photo agency; Online USA, a specialist in celebrity shots; and the Hulton Picture Library, the former archive of the British photojournalistic magazine Picture Post. The Hulton collection was sold by the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
to Brian Deutsch in 1988, when it was renamed Hulton Deutsch. In 1996, the Hulton collection was sold on once more, this time purchased by Getty Images and renamed Hulton Getty. With the acquisition of the Hulton library, Getty Images took ownership of the rights to some 15 million photographs from the British press archives dating back to the Nineteenth Century. Hulton Getty also included photographs from the Keystone Collection
Keystone View Company
The Keystone View Company was a major distributor of stereographic images, and was located in Meadville, Pennsylvania. From 1892 through 1963 Keystone produced and distributed both educational and comic/sentimental stereoviews, and stereoscopes. By 1905 it was the world's largest stereographic...
, as well as images by notable photogaphers such as Bert Hardy
Bert Hardy
Bert Hardy was a documentary and press photographer known for his work published in the Picture Post magazine between 1941 and1957....
, Bill Brandt
Bill Brandt
Bill Brandt was an influential British photographer and photojournalist known for his high-contrast images of British society and his distorted nudes and landscapes.-Career and life:...
, Weegee
Weegee
Weegee was the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig , a photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography....
and Ernst Haas
Ernst Haas
Ernst Haas was an Austrian artist and influential photographer noted for his innovations in color photography, experiments in abstract light and form, and as a member of the Magnum Photos agency....
.
Getty also branched out into stock audio and video with the acquisition of EyeWire and Energy Film Library.
In 2000, Getty acquired one of its main competitors, Archive Photos of New York (a division of The Image Bank), for US$183 million. The Archive Photos library was combined with the Hulton Getty collection to form a new subsidiary, Hulton Archive. Archive Photos had been 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
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, Metronome
Metronome magazine
Metronome Magazine was a music-guide magazine published from the 1881 until 1961.The magazine in its early years catered for musicians in marching and then dance bands, but from the swing era, Metronome focused primarily on the genre of Jazz music appealing to fans...
and George Eastman House
George Eastman House
The George Eastman House is the world's oldest museum dedicated to photography and one of the world's oldest film archives, opened to the public in 1949 in Rochester, New York, USA. World-renowned for its photograph and motion picture archives, the museum is also a leader in film preservation and...
, and works by photographers such as Ruth Orkin
Ruth Orkin
Ruth Orkin was an American photographer, filmmaker and a late member of the Photo League. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Orkin married photographer and filmmaker Morris Engel....
, Deborah Feingold, Murray Garrett, Nat Fein
Nat Fein
Nathaniel Fein was an American Press Photographer for the New York Herald Tribune for thirty-three years....
and John Filo
John Filo
John Paul Filo took the 1970 Pulitzer Prize winning photo of a 14-year-old runaway girl , crying while kneeling over the body of 20-year-old Jeffrey Miller, one of the victims of the Kent State shootings...
.
Further acquisitions followed, with the purchase in 2004 of image.net for $20 million USD. On February 9, 2006, the microstock
Microstock photography
Microstock photography, also known as micropayment photography, is a part of the stock photography industry. What defines a company as a microstock photography company is that they source their images almost exclusively via the Internet, do so from a wider range of photographers than the...
photo website iStockphoto
IStockphoto
iStockphoto is an online, royalty free, international microstock photography provider operating with the micropayment business model. Images cost between 1 and 150 credits, depending on size and image collection .- History :The company was founded by Bruce Livingstone in May, 2000...
was acquired by Getty Images for $50 million USD. In 2007, Getty successfully purchased its largest competitor, MediaVast, for $207 million. The acquisition meant that Getty Images gained control of WireImage (Entertainment, creative, and sports photography), FilmMagic (fashion and red carpet photography), Contour Photos (portrait and studio photography). Getty Images also acquired a host of other subsidiaries including "Master Delegates" who include: Gallo Images in Johannesburg
Johannesburg
Johannesburg also known as Jozi, Jo'burg or Egoli, is the largest city in South Africa, by population. Johannesburg is the provincial capital of Gauteng, the wealthiest province in South Africa, having the largest economy of any metropolitan region in Sub-Saharan Africa...
, Touchline Photo in Cape Town
Cape Town
Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...
, Isifa Image Service
Isifa Image Service
Isifa Image Service is a Stock Photography Agency and the Master Delegate for Getty Images, supplying the Czech and Slovak Republics it was founded in 1995, and has been supplying Poland since 2005...
in Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
, Laura Ronchi in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
On October 23, 2008, Getty Images announced their intention to buy Jupitermedia
Jupitermedia
WebMediaBrands Corp. a U.S.-based corporation, established in 1971, headquartered in New York, is a leading Internet media company that provides content, education, and career services to media and creative professionals through a portfolio of vertical online properties, communities and trade...
's online images division, Jupiterimages, for $96 million in cash. The sale went ahead in February 2009; Jupiterimages (including the sites stock.xchng
Stock.xchng
stock.xchng is a website providing free-to use stock photography and illustrations, its name being a reduced version of "stock exchange"...
and StockXpert) is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Getty, while Jupitermedia, now trading as WebMediaBrands, continues its internet publishing business which was not sold to Getty Images.
In December 2008, it was announced that Getty Images was acquiring Redferns Music Picture Library, the London-based music photography collection.
Sale of company
In February 2008 it was announced that Getty Images would be acquired by Hellman & FriedmanHellman & Friedman
Hellman & Friedman is a private equity firm, founded in 1984 by Warren Hellman and Tully Friedman, that makes investments primarily through leveraged buyouts and minority growth capital investments....
in a transaction valued at an estimated US$2.4 billion.
On July 2, 2008, Getty Images announced the completion of its acquisition by the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman. Getty Images common stock ceased trading on the New York Stock Exchange
New York Stock Exchange
The New York Stock Exchange is a stock exchange located at 11 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, New York City, USA. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed companies at 13.39 trillion as of Dec 2010...
at the close of the acquisition and was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.
Controversial practices to enforce copyright
Getty Images has caused controversy for its aggressive pursuit of copyright enforcement on behalf of its photographers. Rather than pursue a policy of sending out "cease and desist" notices, Getty typically mails out a letter claiming substantial sums of damages to owners of websites which it believes are using their images in infringement of their photographers copyright. In one case, a church in LichfieldLichfield
Lichfield is a cathedral city, civil parish and district in Staffordshire, England. One of eight civil parishes with city status in England, Lichfield is situated roughly north of Birmingham...
, Staffordshire
Staffordshire
Staffordshire is a landlocked county in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes, the county is a NUTS 3 region and is one of four counties or unitary districts that comprise the "Shropshire and Staffordshire" NUTS 2 region. Part of the National Forest lies within its borders...
, was faced with a £6,000 bill for photographs used on its website, apparently placed there by a church volunteer. However, Getty rarely if ever issues court proceedings, instead relying on debt collection agencies to enforce its claims.