Bruce Livingstone is a Canadian entrepreneur who founded Calgary-based iStockphoto, an online distributor of stock photography.
Livingstone started iStockphoto in 2000 as a project offering stock photos for free over the internet. In 2002, high monthly bandwidth bills prodded him to implement a payment/credit system. In 2006, Livingstone sold iStockphoto to Getty Images for $50 million, where he continued on as iStockphoto's CEO. [1] Livingstone picked up additional roles at Getty (including SVP Consumer [2] ) but left Getty and iStockphoto in 2009. [1]
In 2010, he became CEO of Saatchi Online, an internet-based art community, and later resigned his position in 2012.[ citation needed ]
In 2013, unhappy with the direction of iStock under Getty (and following the expiration of his non-compete agreement) Livingston founded Stocksy United, a royalty-free stock photo and video agency based in Victoria, BC. [3]
Getty Images Holdings, Inc. is an American visual media company and supplier of stock images, editorial photography, video, and music for business and consumers, with a library of over 477 million assets. It targets three markets—creative professionals, the media, and corporate.
Niklas Zennström is a Swedish entrepreneur and technology investor. Zennström is also the co-founder of the charity organization Zennström Philanthropies.
BENlabs, formerly BEN Group Inc, is a Los Angeles-based product placement, influencer marketing and licensing company. The company offers AI-driven product placement, influencer marketing services, music partnerships, rights clearance, and personality rights management services for the entertainment industry.
Stock photography is the supply of photographs which are often licensed for specific uses. The stock photo industry, which began to gain hold in the 1920s, has established models including traditional macrostock photography, midstock photography, and microstock photography. Conventional stock agencies charge from several hundred to several thousand US dollars per image, while microstock photography may sell for around US$25 cents. Professional stock photographers traditionally place their images with one or more stock agencies on a contractual basis, while stock agencies may accept the high-quality photos of amateur photographers through online submission.
Stock footage, and similarly, archive footage, library pictures, and file footage is film or video footage that can be used again in other films. Stock footage is beneficial to filmmakers as it saves shooting new material. A single piece of stock footage is called a "stock shot" or a "library shot". Stock footage may have appeared in previous productions but may also be outtakes or footage shot for previous productions and not used. Examples of stock footage that might be utilized are moving images of cities and landmarks, wildlife in their natural environments, and historical footage. Suppliers of stock footage may be either rights managed or royalty-free. Many websites offer direct downloads of clips in various formats.
stock.xchng was a website providing free-to use stock photography and illustrations, its name being a reduced version of "stock exchange". The site was launched in February 2001 by Peter Hamza, and allows users to contribute, share and download high-resolution photographs and illustrations free of charge. Contributors are encouraged to submit material to enhance their photography career through wider public exposure. In 2009, the site had over 2,500,000 registered users and more than 400,000 photos. Until 2009, it operated parallel to its sister site, Stockxpert.com, until the site's parent company, Jupiterimages, was purchased by Getty Images, and the site is now tied in with the iStock library of paid images.
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and professional photographers to host high-resolution photos. It has changed ownership several times and has been owned by SmugMug since April 20, 2018.
Jonathan David Klein is co-founder and Chairman of Getty Images, Inc., a global digital media company.
Mecklermedia was a U.S.-based corporation. The original WebMediaBrands was established in 1994, and headquartered in New York. Founded by Alan M. Meckler and Tristan Louis, the company provides business-to-business (B2B) services for creative, business and information technology professionals, including recruitment and event promotion.
Evan "Ev" Clark Williams is an American billionaire technology entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of Twitter, and was its CEO from 2008 to 2010, and a member of its board from 2007 to 2019. He founded Blogger and Medium, two of the largest blogging internet platforms. In 2014, he co-founded the venture capital firm Obvious Ventures. As of February 2022, his net worth is estimated at US$2.1 billion.
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 (1) source their images almost exclusively via the Internet, (2) do so from a wider range of photographers than the traditional stock agencies, and (3) sell their images at a very low rate for a royalty-free (RF) image.
iStock is an online royalty free, international micro stock photography provider based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The firm offers millions of photos, illustrations, clip art, videos and audio tracks. Artists, designers and photographers worldwide contribute their work to iStock collections in return for royalties. Nearly half a million new photos, illustrations, videos and audio files, are added each month.
Shutterstock, Inc. is an American provider of stock photography, stock footage, stock music, and editing tools; it is headquartered in New York. Founded in 2003 by programmer and photographer Jon Oringer, Shutterstock maintains a library of around 200 million royalty-free stock photos, vector graphics, and illustrations, with around 10 million video clips and music tracks available for licensing. Originally a subscription site only, Shutterstock expanded beyond subscriptions into a la carte pricing in 2008. It has been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2012.
PhotoDisc, Inc. based in Seattle, was a publisher of digital stock photography free of royalties. It was founded in 1991 by Tom Hughes, Mark Callaghan and Mark Torrance, who later became the chief executive officer and chairman. After receiving the catalog in the mail, customers would write or phone the office and order the photos or pre-made collections by charter artists Clement Mok or Nick Koudis which would then be shipped to them on CD-ROM. In the fall of 1995, their website was launched making business more convenient as it was no longer necessary to wait for shipping as photos could be downloaded directly from the website, the catalog option was still available, though. In September 1997, PhotoDisc agreed to combine with London-based Getty Communications to form the Seattle-based Getty Images. In February 1998, at the closure of the acquisition, PhotoDisc's library amounted to 60,000 images.
Jon Oringer is an American programmer, photographer, and billionaire businessman, best known as the founder and CEO of Shutterstock, a stock media company headquartered in New York City. Oringer started his career while a college student in the 1990s, when he created "one of the Web's first pop-up blockers." He went on to found about ten small startups that used a subscription method to sell "personal firewalls, accounting software, cookie blockers, trademark managers," and other small programs.
Timothy M. Armstrong is an American business executive. He was formerly the CEO of Oath Inc., then a subsidiary of Verizon Communications that served as the umbrella company of its digital content subdivisions, including AOL and Yahoo!. Previously, he was the CEO of AOL Inc. from 2009 until its purchase by Verizon in 2015.
Stocksy United, also referred to as Stocksy or Stocksy United Photography, is a Victoria, British Columbia based platform cooperative that accepts and provides royalty-free stock photography and stock video. Stocksy uses a curated editing approach to select useful and authentic photos. The co-op differs from other stock photography firms by its stated focus on fair pay and creating sustainable careers for its members.
Alamy is a British privately owned stock photography agency launched in September 1999. Its headquarters are in Milton Park, near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. It has a development and operations centre at Technopark in Trivandrum, Kerala, India and a sales office in Brooklyn, New York, United States.
Tweak is an Irish-owned business, founded in 2008 by Jerry Kennelly. Kennelly is an entrepreneur from County Kerry who developed Stockbyte, which was acquired by Getty Images in 2006. Kennelly began developing Tweak two years after Stockbyte was acquired by Getty Images and was officially launched in 2011.
Pexels is a provider of stock photography and stock footage. It was founded in Germany in 2014 and maintains a library with over 3.2 million free stock photos and videos.