February 9, 2006
One stop shopping.
Calgary seems to be a popular place to shop for visual content companies. One 800-pound gorilla in particular has loaded up his cart once again. If you haven’t already connected the dots, Getty Images bought iStockPhoto.com (and some apparently intangible assets) for fifty million smackers. Holy mother of crap.
After the initial fuzz of bewilderment wore off, I wanted to extend a firm congratulatory handshake to Bruce, Brad, Pat, Kelly and the rest of the crew over at that other stock photo joint across town. Fifty million. It’s not often a ball like that lands in your yard. I can’t imagine anyone tossing it back over the fence. Now, I don’t wish to dampen the festivities … but where is the logic in this? What’s the math? That’s one hell of a lot of cash to pay for some incremental, heavily-weighted non-commerce web traffic and a vocal community of folks who enjoyed iStock specifically because it wasn’t Getty.
Good luck, you nutty kids. Having been part of a previous Getty merge and purge, I have a feeling you’re going to need it.
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