In 2008, Getty Images probably licensed rights to fewer than 500,000 images for commercial uses (not unique images, because some sold many times). The revenue generated from these sales was about $225 million, according to Goldman Sachs’ analysis of Getty business at the end of 2007. Getty’s revenue for rights-managed and royalty-free should have been about equal.
It is highly likely that all the other sellers in the world combined licensed about the same number of images for commercial uses as Getty, so a total of around 1 million rights-managed images were licensed for commercial uses. At the end of 2006, when Getty last disclosed the average price for a rights-managed image, it was about $500. Since then, the average price has dropped significantly; however, the only publicly available figure is Alamy’s $308 average of the last quarter of 2008. Getty’s figure was probably somewhat higher.
There were about twice as many—2 million—traditional royalty-free images licensed at an average of $193 to $240 per image, most for commercial uses. In total, this brings the market to roughly 3 million traditional image transactions.
At the same time, over 50 million microstock and subscription images were licensed in 2008. iStockphoto alone was responsible for 25 million. That means that the rights-managed segment of the business represents about 2% to 3% of the total images licensed, and this segment is declining in size.