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Getty Images Holdings, Inc.
Getty Images is a stock photo and video company that sells licenses for creative and editorial images to businesses and media organizations.
Getty Images is a giant photo library and marketplace. When an ad agency needs a picture of a smiling family for a billboard, or a news website needs a shot of a world leader at a summit, Getty is one of the first places they look. The company has spent decades building a vast archive of millions of images and videos, both from its own photographers and from partners who contribute their work.
The business runs on two main kinds of content. Creative images are the polished, staged photos used for advertising and marketing — a couple laughing over coffee, a businessman pointing at a chart. Editorial images are the raw, real-time shots of news, sports, and entertainment events, sold to newspapers and broadcasters who need them fast. Getty also owns the smaller rival Shutterstock, a deal that closed in 2025 and consolidated two of the biggest names in stock media into one company. Customers pay for licenses, not for the files themselves. A company might buy a subscription that gives it a set number of downloads per month, or pay per image for something specific. The price depends on how the image will be used — a small blog post costs less than a nationwide ad campaign. Getty's real advantage is its scale: it has the widest selection, the deepest news coverage, and long-standing relationships with major media outlets and ad agencies. Competitors include free or cheap alternatives like Canva and a long tail of smaller stock sites, which put pressure on pricing.
Getty has struggled to grow. Revenue has been roughly flat for years, and the company carries a heavy debt load from its 2022 public listing. It has responded by cutting costs and betting on AI. Getty launched a generative AI tool that lets customers create images trained on its own licensed library, and it has sued AI companies it says scraped its photos without permission — a legal fight that could shape how the whole industry works. The company is headquartered in Seattle, though its name still carries the London roots of the Getty family's original photo business.
Saved answer · last researched 14 Nov 2026