Photo website Getty Images Entrepreneurship: 3.3 Billion dollar picture business

Getty images A picture of the "911" terrorist attack. This website collects many photos and authorizes others to use them.

Getty images, founded in 1995, has no revolutionary ideas such as Twitter and Facebook, but it is Google in the picture world, with a two-tier market valued at $3.3 billion. It's a very simple model: collect digital photos from professional, unprofessional people and sell them to others.

Through a lot of mergers and acquisitions, Getty images is now the world's largest image and video agency, with 80 million of images in the database, and many web slides and photo galleries. For example, to search for "Happy arranges" in the gallery, you can return 626,319 results. It is because of such a huge resource that Getty image has its tentacles throughout a variety of blogs, websites, businesses, advertisers and magazines.

Getty Images's annual income is close to 1 billion dollars, becoming a media force that cannot be ignored. Carlyle Group apparently noticed this, and the private-equity firm August 15 bought a majority stake in Getty Image from another private equity firm, Hellman & Friedman, on a 3.3 billion dollar valuation. The rest is held by the co-founder of Getty images, the Sun Mark Ghedy of Hempaul Ghedy (J. Paul Getty) and former investment banker Getty (Jonathan Klein), respectively. However, their identities have already become the chairman and CEO of Getty Images.

Gedi and Klein co-founded the image company at the Hambrose Bank in London. "It is a manual industry, without any commercial rules, entirely operated by photographers." "Klein said.

They initially spent 30 million dollars to buy the British picture company Tony Stone Images. Since then, Getty images has acquired more than 100 photo companies. They went public in 1996 and relocated their headquarters to Seattle in 3 years to get closer to technology companies and customers. Like Wal-Mart, Getty images crazy expansion, making small photo agencies lose their living space.

Getty images very early on the impact of the digital revolution on photography. They bought PhotoDisc in 1998, the first company to sell pictures in digital format. David Walker, executive editor of Photo District News, said: "They are always aware of the threat and then embark on an acquisition." "By 2011, all of Getty images's operations had shifted to the digital realm.

The photographic effects of digital cameras and mobile phones have improved, making it possible for everyone to become photographers, and this has also given the industry a bigger jolt. 2005, a company called iStockPhoto, became a leading enterprise in the field of amateur picture. The company's picture average price is 2 to 3 dollars. Getty Images $50 million in 2006 to buy it.

With the media and advertising industry shrinking, as well as the rise of the Internet, Getty images began to advance the "meager profit" field. Soon, the Getty images model was completely reversed: the company initially licensed expensive images to a small group of customers and restricted their use, and now licensed cheap pictures to a large number of customers and allowed widespread use. "The most fundamental change is the way pictures are used and the media they use," Klein explains. ”

Before Getty Images acquired iStockPhoto, it had 150,000 customers a year, now reaching 1.3 million, and about 900,000 are small and medium-sized enterprises. 15 years ago, Getty images uploaded hundreds of images a day, now reaching tens of thousands of. Getty images once authorized or sold 100,000 pictures a year and now has 30 million to 40 million tickets.

Getty images provides customers with different licensing agreements, including subscription services. The higher the exclusive right of the picture, the higher the cost. If you are allowing any customer to use the picture in any form, the average price is about 208 USD. If the copyright picture is better quality, it depends on the level of exclusive rights. Getty images has a very popular picture this year, shooting a man surfing in a huge wave. A customer who uses the picture in less than 60 seconds of a TV ad needs to pay 2050 dollars a month. If you use one months in online advertising, it costs about 465 dollars. Blogs with less than 1 million readers need to pay 220 dollars.

Customers get better pictures at lower prices, but professional photographers are squeezed out. As the market changes and amateur photographers grow, their licensing fees are also falling. Even a professional joked: "Everyone knows how to make money from photography, only photographers do not know." Klein agrees: "It's getting harder for professional photographers to make money." But we are the photographer's earning engine. The company employs a total of 115 full-time photographers.

Getty images left rivals far behind. But Instagram and other pictures to share the site or gradually poses a threat to it. Some people in the industry believe that this kind of service will advance into the field of professional photography sooner or later. Klein was also cautious: "I've been worried about how fast we can adapt to this change." We must keep a close eye on the trend. ”

Of course, Getty images has been unable to acquire Instagram. The company has been spending 1 billion of dollars on Facebook this spring.