The world-wide digital content market which is largely comprised of photographs is US$1.5 billion annually and growing rapidly.
The largest stock agency, GettyOne based in Seattle has annual sales of $250 million (all figures US$) and in the last 5 years has spent $1 billion to buy 24 other agencies including: The Image Bank ($183 million, 30 million images), Tony Stone Images (1999 revenues $100 million) and Seattle based Photodisc (the largest on the Net), and has invested $50 million in digitizing some of their images. Some images are wholly owned, but GettyOne also pays royalties on many of its images. Photographers generally get 40-50 percent of the take.
Corbis, founded in 1989 and wholly owned by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates owns several collections including the Bettman archive (17 million images) and Sygma (the European Press Agency, 40 million images). Corbis employs 850 people and has annual revenues of $100 million (estimated). Corbis mostly owns their images and has 65 million images in total, of which 2.1 million are digitized.
