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.
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 that 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$0.25 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.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.
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.
Royalty-free (RF) material subject to copyright or other intellectual property rights may be used without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each copy or volume sold or some time period of use or sales.
Rights Managed, or RM, in photography and the stock photo industry, refers to a copyright license which, if purchased by a user, allows the one-time use of the photo as specified by the license. If the user wants to use the photo for other uses an additional license needs to be purchased. RM licences can be given on a non-exclusive or exclusive basis. In stock photography RM is one of the two common license types together with royalty-free, subscription and microstock photography being business models often confused as separate license types.
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.
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.
A21, Inc. was a licenser and distributor of digital images.
DreamsTime.com is an online royalty-free microstock provider based in Brentwood, Tennessee.
Construction Photography is a photo library and agency based in London, England. It was established in 2001 to provide the construction and built environment industries an alternative to multinational agencies such as Getty images and Corbis.
Bigstock is an online royalty-free, international microstock photography website that sells images via a credit-based system. Bigstock's photos, vectors and illustrations cost from between 1 and 6 credits each, depending on size, with credits ranging from $.90 to US$3.00. BigStockPhoto was founded in Davis, California, in the fall of 2004. Bigstock adds to its library every day as photographers and designers from around the world submit their work. As of June 2015, Bigstock had more than 25 million royalty-free images available.
Yuri Arcurs, born Jacob Yuri Wackerhausen on July 27, 1979 is a Danish stock photographer and owner of PeopleImages.com. In 2007 he was the top ranked selling contributor at Shutterstock, Fotolia, Crestock and BigStockPhoto In 2008 Arcurs sold 650,000 images per year through 16 different microstock agencies
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.
Depositphotos is a company operating a royalty-free content website with headquarters in New York, USA. It was founded by Dmitry Sergeev in November 2009 in Kyiv, Ukraine. The Depositphotos library has over 200 million files, including royalty-free stock photos, vector images, video clips, and editorial files. In 2012, the Depositphotos library exceeded 10 million files in less than four years and was considered one of the fastest-growing photobanks in the world.
Pond5 is a New York–based online marketplace for royalty-free media. The company licenses stock footage, stock music, stock photography, sound effects, Adobe After Effects templates, and 3D models. Pond5 claims to have the world's largest collection of stock footage, and that they host more than 38 million clips as of September 2023.
Can Stock Photo was a stock photography provider which licenses royalty-free images, photos, digital illustrations, picture clip art and footage files on behalf of photographers, illustrators, and videographers. Founded in 2004, it was one of the earliest microstock agencies. The Can Stock Photo will cease exist on October 1, 2023.
123RF, a branch of Inmagine Group, is a stock photos agency founded in 2005 which sells royalty-free images and stock photography. The company also has an expansive collection of vector graphics, icons, fonts, videos, and audio files.
