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Mathias Schindler wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/business/media/21deal.html?ref=business
Getty Images, the world's biggest supplier of pictures and video to
media and advertising companies, has put itself on the auction block
and could fetch more than $1.5 billion, people briefed on the
situation said Sunday.
It's no wonder they're trying to sell now, when they think they can
still get $1.5 billion. They see the writing on the wall; the
simultaneous advancements in pro-sumer level digital cameras and growth
of free content repositories like Flickr* and Wikimedia Commons have
decimated their once lucrative business. And it's only going to go
downhill for them from here.
*Of course, most of Flickr's content does not qualify as free content,
but even the small percentage that does makes up many millions of
photographs, more than enough to threaten Getty's business model.
Slight complication is that Getty own a lot of historical images that
are not really replaceable either because they are iconic or because
they are about the only pictures of the event in question.
--
geni