Very few competitors are aiming to have Getty Images’ breadth in terms

“Very few competitors are aiming to have Getty Images’ breadth in terms of different kinds of imagery for different kinds of markets,” says Klein.Getty Images has also acquired Allsport, a leading sports agency, Gamma Liaison, an American news and photojournalism agency, and Energy Film, a stock footage library.Corbis, according to Davis, consciously chose not to acquire large companies in the way that Getty has. Now we are expanding into the commercial with the acquisition of Digital Stock. Getty’s initial focus was on commercial with Tony Stone and now PhotoDisc, but they are extending their reach into the editorial.”Getty and Klein cautiously acknowledge the competition but are keen to highlight their company’s scope. Commenting on this on a recent visit to London, Steve Davis, Corbis president, said: “Our focus to date, unlike Getty, has been on the editorial market. Mark Torrance, PhotoDisc chief and Getty Images co-chairman, admitted that the acquisition of Digital Stock made Corbis a direct competitor: “They’ve targeted us and they’re entering the fray.”Royalty-free images are growing rapidly, with Web-based sales rising at a staggering rate.

A week earlier Corbis had acquired Digital Stock, another leading royalty-free company – openly targeting Getty’s traditional advertising and design markets. In February, Getty Images announced a $200m merger with the royalty-free (pay once for unlimited use) image company PhotoDisc. And then there’s the Bettman Collection’s 17 million images, illustrating the entire history of mankind and currently in great demand for various millennium-based projects.Gates’s battle with Getty intensified at the beginning of this year. Corbis is home to such leading collections as Ansel Adams, the Detroit Museum, the National Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and LGI, a worldwide resource for contemporary celebrity photos.

Gates invested several years creating a solid digital storage and delivery system and only in 1994 started acquiring stock.Gates has made waves by buying up collections of historic photos with a war chest estimated at $100m, and Corbis’s stock now contains more than 20 million images, all accessible via the Internet. In April 1996, Getty acquired the world-famous Hulton Deutsch collection, subsequently renamed Hulton Getty. With more than 16 million images dating from the early days of photography, it is one of the two largest privately owned collections in the world.The other is the Bettman Collection, the largest component in Bill Gates’s ensemble. Since founding Corbis in 1989, Gates has been prudently asserting his position in the market. The Corbis strategy has focused on new information management and distribution technologies and the Internet. Its pounds 28m price- tag bought Getty Images more than 1 million photos and an established distribution system.

After the sale in 1993 of Getty Oil, he found what he called the “highly fragmented” industry of stock photography. From their surprisingly modest London office, Getty and Klein spoke of the hectic years of bringing the pieces together.The first in a long line of acquisitions took place in 1995, with Tony Stone, one of the world’s leading stock photography names. Thanks to the Internet, our future potential customer base will be tens of millions.”Unlike Corbis, which was digital from conception, Getty started his empire in a mostly analogue world. Identifying the latter as a key differentiator between today’s and tomorrow’s business, Getty Images co-founder Jonathan Klein says: “Last year’s active customer base was 120,000. Swift access to digital images is now guaranteed by a computerised search using specialised software. An order can be placed online and the final image downloaded as a compressed JPEG file.Both Getty, through his Getty Images firm, and Gates, via his Corbis business, recognised the transforming power of technology in general and the Internet in particular.