Getty is the Equifax of images. They own everything. And if they don't own it, they will buy it, and then own it. Try searching for something, anything. Grass-stained wiffle ball lying on the ground? Beads of rainwater on an umbrella? Two red foxes sniffing each other in the woods in autumn. Guaranteed among the first five images, one will belong to Getty, and it will be the best one.
This has been written about before on Network Address. Right about the time that Google bought Pinterest (2018ish) and then rearranged their image search algorithm to show nothing but images hosted on Pinterest, the site that requires you to sign-up and log-in to see the images. So now even if I wanted to, I can't source the image I just right-clicked, saved, and posted to my weblog, no matter who it belongs to or who made it.
Then enter Getty -- they forced Google to change their image search engine to force you to go to the website where the image came from in order to see beyond the thumbnail. This way, Getty can get money from advertisers on the websites where their images are found: Anger at Google image search peace deal, Feb 2018, BBC.
Sorry if you forgot, but the "com" in .com stands for commerce.
But things have changed a bit. When Stable Diffusion was released to the public as an open source program that can run an image generating neural net using only the GPU's already in your own computer, it pretty much destroyed the business prospects of any company like Getty. That's why we're looking at the screenshot of their stock price circa August 15 2022, when Stable Diffusion was released.
Why Getty Images gambled on a SPAC to go public after a 14-year absence from public markets
Sep 2022, Fortune Magazine
I asked Leyden if A.I. image generation could be a potential threat to Getty Images’ business. “We’re watching that space, like everyone else is, pretty closely,” she told me. “We don’t think about it as competition. We think of it as further evidence that the demand for visual content is just growing.”
Post Script:
It's hard to keep track, but "In 2021, Getty Images acquired Unsplash, which offers “widely accessed,” free creative photography; its website is ad-supported with over 17,000 users of its API. “That’s a big focus for us and really monetizing that creator economy that Unsplash taps into,” Leyden says.
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