Photo wars: A $2 billion business gets rough
The giants of the stock photo business–Getty Images and Corbis–are being challenged by a flock of tiny “microstock” agencies. And it’s become a game that almost anyone can play, reports Business 2.0 Magazine.
(Business 2.0 Magazine) — Steve Davis used to have a hard time explaining to his mom what he did for a living. She understood that he was the CEO of a Seattle company called Corbis, that it was owned by Bill Gates, and that it sold a lot of pictures.
But she didn’t really understand the enormity of Corbis, which holds the rights to 100 million images, including some of the world’s most famous photographs, from the exploding Hindenburg to Einstein sticking out his tongue. So a few years ago, on a visit to the small town in Montana where he grew up, Davis showed his mother some of the places where the company’s images end up.
“We went to the magazine counter at the one store in town, and Corbis had pictures on 10 covers there,” he remembers. “Then we went to the book department, and we had some of the book covers too. At the movie theater, The Matrix was playing, and Corbis had sold stills to the studio for that.”
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