The Global Visual Content Market is highly consolidated, and in the past decade has shifted to online or the digital platform. Digital content, entertainment, and licensing industry, which is primarily characterized by images and videos, is gaining new foothold across social media platforms.
This digital content market is concentrated with almost 50 percent of the revenues generated by the top four players in the market. Digital content has seen a rise in user generated images, social media integration and crowd-sourced models. Ushering an era of partnerships, new online digital content models are leveraging platforms like mobile devices.
Vendors are drawing parallels from companies like Shutterstock, who in a strategic move have partnered with Facebook to provide advertisers with access to millions of high-quality photos and illustrations.
Technavio analysts have identified the top 10 players in the digital content distribution space:
Corbis
“Corbis is a digital content, entertainment, and licensing company founded in 1989 by Bill Gates. It is a leading service of stock photos and illustrations and other visual communication material.
Corbis offers its visual content on two different websites – corbisimages.com and corbismotion.com. Corbis Images provides images for creative and editorial purposes. Corbis Motion provides creative and editorial motion clips. Corbis Entertainment aids in connecting global brands and consumers through entertainment. It also specializes in rights representation, clearances, and music permissions.
Corbis’s visual content is accessed in more than 50 countries. It has a library of more than 100 million images along with 800,000 videos and provides flexible image subscription plans.”
Fotolia
“Fotolia, a microstock provider, was founded in 2005 by Oleg Tscheltzoff, Patrick Chassany, and Thibaud Elziere. It is headquartered in New York City, US. It has over 17 million digital images and
It provides products in various representative categories such as landscapes, architecture, people, fauna and flora, objects, transportation, food and drink, sports and leisure, backgrounds and textures, abstract, and others. It also offers visual content in many conceptual categories, including business, technology, emotions and feelings, concepts, human features, lifestyles, welfare, science and nature, social issues, and travel.
It targets professional designers, managers, presenters, small business owners, and students for their websites, brochures, reports, slides, advertisements, and presentations.”
Getty Images
“Getty Images, known earlier as Getty Communications Limited, was founded by Mark Getty and Jonathan Klein in 1995 to cater to the needs of visual communicators. It involves the creation and distribution of traditional and digital content such as imagery, news, sports and entertainment.
It also creates premium content for business customers in the US and international markets. In 2008, the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman acquired Getty Images and later the company was acquired by The Carlyle Group from Hellman & Friedman for about US$3.3 billion in 2012.
The company is based in Seattle, Washington, US, and its market extends to more than 100 countries. Its customers include advertising and graphic design firms, publishing organizations such as newspapers, websites, magazines, corporate communications departments, and film and broadcast producers.”
Shutterstock
“Shutterstock licenses commercial digital imagery for its customers. It also offers an online learning platform for digital professionals. It serves business customers, marketing agencies, and media organizations in North America, Europe, and other international markets.
Shutterstock’s main contributors include photographers, designers, illustrators, and videographers whose images and videos are licensed for use by commercial designers, graphic artists, magazines, newspapers and book publishers, bloggers, and web designers for their visual communication material.”
Alamy
“Alamy is a privately owned stock photography agency. Alamy was founded in 1999 by James West and Mike Fischer and is headquartered in the UK. It has offices in the US and India and sales teams in Germany and Australia.”
AP Images
“AP Images is a stock photography provider by Associated Press. It provides informative images covering topics ranging from breaking news and sports to business, entertainment, weather, fashion, travel, royalty-free, rights-managed, and microstock.”
Dreamstime
“Dreamstime is a supplier of digital images and was established in 2000. It is an online community- based site and is headquartered in Tennessee, US. It serves independent customers and Fortune 500 companies in the US and international markets.”
Fotosearch
“Fotosearch is a provider of stock photography, illustrations, maps, video, and audio. It was launched in 1998 and has its base in Wisconsin, US. It was launched by Publishing Perfection.”
Photofolio
“Photofolio is an online stock that serves as a platform for photographers to share and sell their photographs. It is based in Peterborough, England. It provides royalty-free images for marketers and publishers.”
Reuters Pictures
“Reuters’ global network of 600 photographers distributes 1,600 pictures each day, added to a growing archive of over 6 million. Images are transmitted within minutes to the world’s media providing a constant window on the world.
Our photographers won more than 60 international photography awards in 2012, including major prizes for Damir Sagolj in World Press Photo and Pictures of the Year International.”
