Getty Images, a British-American visual media company with headquarters in Seattle, Washington, has acquired Unsplash, a website dedicated to sharing stock photography.
Though the amount involved was not mentioned, Getty Images will fund the transaction from existing cash balances.
Started in 2013 as a Tumblr blog with ten photos, Unsplash now offers over 2 million free high-resolution images, providing an easily searchable online platform for a community of millions of users. The company works with some of the world’s leading brands to curate, amplify and syndicate their content to the platform’s broad audiences. The Unsplash mission is to make world-class images accessible to enable everyone to create.
As of 2021, Unsplash has over two billion image downloads across the globe, allowing brands in Unsplash’s unrivaled ecosystem to syndicate targeted images that are seen 22 billion times, and by 300 million people, each month. The company recently launched Unsplash Hire, a more direct way to connect and work with Unsplash contributors to create world-class images.
“We could not be happier to welcome Unsplash to the Getty Images family,” said Craig Peters, Chief Executive Officer, Getty Images. “The Unsplash team share our values and share our vision of enabling global creativity and communication. We are impressed by what the Unsplash team and community has built and we look forward to supporting their continued development.”
Unsplash founders, Mikael Cho, Luke Chesser and Stephanie Liverani, will continue to lead and operate the Unsplash business maintaining its free content model, reporting into Getty Images CEO, Craig Peters.
Mikael Cho, Co-Founder and CEO of Unsplash said, “I’m so proud of what the Unsplash community and team has created. And it’s only the beginning. This partnership is an important milestone for Unsplash, but our mission of Photos for Everyone remains unchanged. We are very excited to partner with Getty Images to move the industry forward together.”
Mikael adds that the partnership with Getty Impages will help accelerate the plans for Unsplash for Brands and Unsplash Hire. He says the company has ways they can grow faster together, collaborate more with brands, and create many more opportunities for creative talent. He says that the company will be hiring and adding resources to bring each of these parts of Unsplash to full bloom much quicker than it could have done alone
Getty Images is a supplier of stock images, editorial photography, video and music for business and consumers, with an archive of over 200 million assets. It targets three markets—creative professionals (advertising and graphic design), the media (print and online publishing), and corporate (in-house design, marketing and communication departments).
In 1995 Chairman Mark Getty and CEO Jonathan Kein founded Getty Investments LLC in London. In September 1997, Getty Communications, as it was called at the time, merged with PhotoDisc, Inc. to form Getty Images.
