Corbis
Overview
Corbis was a digital image licensing company based in Seattle, Washington, founded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in 1989. Over twenty-seven years it assembled one of the largest visual archives in the world — more than 100 million photographs and hundreds of thousands of videos by the time of its sale — including the historic Bettmann Archive, the French news agency Sygma, and digital rights to works held by major museums. For most of its life it was the chief rival of Getty Images in the global stock photography business. In January 2016 Corbis sold its image licensing business to Unity Glory International, an affiliate of China's Visual China Group, which arranged for Getty Images to distribute the Corbis library outside China; the remaining Corbis entertainment business continued separately under a new name.
Founding and Original Idea
Gates founded the company in 1989 under the name Interactive Home Systems. The original concept was strikingly ahead of its market: homeowners would decorate their walls with digital frames displaying licensed artworks and famous photographs, changing the images at will. Renamed as it evolved — it traded for a time as Continuum Productions — the company shifted from hardware to content, concluding that the durable asset was not the screen but the rights to the images themselves. By the mid-1990s, as Corbis, it was building an interdisciplinary bank of digitised images for delivery to homes, businesses and institutions, negotiating non-exclusive licensing rights with museums and sharing the resulting revenue with them.
Building the Archive
Corbis grew by acquisition on a grand scale. Its landmark purchase came in 1995, when it bought the Bettmann Archive in New York — some eleven million prints and negatives, including the picture libraries of United Press International, acquired by Bettmann in 1990 — and began digitising it. The same era brought the Leonardo Codex Hammer, purchased for about thirty million dollars in the mid-1990s, and digital reproduction rights for art from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the National Gallery in London and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, along with the collections of the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Ansel Adams archive.
In 1999 Corbis acquired Sygma of Paris, then the world's largest news photography agency, for a reported twenty million dollars, adding more than forty million images and bringing its total to about sixty-five million. The German agency Zefa followed in 2005; the stock and design supplier Veer, based in Calgary, was bought in 2007; and celebrity agency Splash News and the crowd-sourced news agency Demotix — acquired in November 2012 after an earlier investment — extended Corbis into entertainment and breaking-news photography. By the early 2010s the company employed about 700 people worldwide, some 400 of them in Seattle, and claimed revenues around 250 million dollars a year, though it had yet to turn a profit and held only about a tenth of a licensing market that Getty dominated with roughly forty per cent.
Services and Operations
Corbis licensed imagery for editorial, advertising and commercial use: creative stock photography, historical and archival pictures, celebrity and entertainment coverage, news photojournalism, and motion footage through Corbis Motion. It also developed businesses adjacent to licensing — rights clearance and celebrity and music rights services through its GreenLight unit, and entertainment marketing and product placement, expanded in January 2012 by the purchase of Los Angeles firm Norm Marshall Associates. Veer served graphic designers with fonts, illustrations and merchandise, in a lower-priced segment than the flagship editorial business.
Digitisation was the operating obsession. Only a fraction of the tens of millions of analogue images Corbis owned could be scanned; the company digitised negatives as clients ordered them, while its online platform made a few million images directly searchable and licensable over the internet — a model that, like Getty's, anticipated the transformation of how pictures were bought and consumed.
Preservation at Iron Mountain
The physical heart of the company was the Bettmann Archive's film library. Between late 2001 and March 2002, Corbis moved the archive from Manhattan to the Iron Mountain underground storage facility, a former limestone quarry 220 feet below ground in western Pennsylvania. There the storage temperature was gradually lowered toward minus four degrees Fahrenheit, the level preservationist Henry Wilhelm determined optimal for long-term film storage; at that temperature the collection would degrade some five hundred times more slowly than it had in Manhattan. The move embodied the Corbis paradox: a digital company whose core asset was a mountain of twentieth-century film, preserved in the cold while it was slowly converted, image by image, into data.
Key Figures
Bill Gates remained the company's owner throughout its independent life, and his personal commitment sustained it through years without profit. Steve Davis served as president during the Sygma acquisition era, articulating the strategy of combining historic depth with real-time news imagery. Gary Shenk was chief executive in the company's later years, presiding over its entertainment expansion and speaking for the industry on the future of photojournalism. On the archive side, the legacy of Otto Bettmann — who sold his collection in 1981, saw it pass to Corbis in 1995, and praised the purchase as his acorn grown into a digitised oak — framed the company's story of itself.
Rivalry with Getty Images
Corbis's history cannot be separated from its duel with Getty Images, founded in 1995 by Mark Getty and Jonathan Klein. The two companies raced to consolidate a fragmented industry of family agencies and archives, bidding for the same collections — Getty bought the Hulton archive and The Image Bank while Corbis bought Bettmann and Sygma — and racing to put images online. Contemporary estimates put the stock market at about a billion dollars growing at ten to fifteen per cent a year at the height of the contest. Getty consistently led in sales and distribution; Corbis led, arguably, in the depth of its historical holdings. The rivalry defined both companies, and its ending was ironic: the Corbis library's ultimate distributor outside China became Getty itself.
Troubles and the Sygma Affair
Scale brought problems. The French operation, Corbis Sygma, bled money, faced heavy fines for mismanaging photographers' work — including a payment of some two million dollars after losing 750 of one photojournalist's photographs — and filed for bankruptcy in 2010 with debts reported around seventy-three million euros. Its millions of photographs were for a time at risk in liquidation, a cautionary tale about the fragility of analogue archives inside digital businesses. Contributors to Demotix also complained publicly, for more than a year after the 2016 sale, about unpaid royalties and silence regarding their archives — friction at the seams where the old agency model met crowd-sourced supply.
Sale to Visual China Group
On 22 January 2016, Corbis announced the sale of its images business — Corbis Images, Corbis Motion and Veer — to Unity Glory International, an affiliate of Visual China Group, China's leading image licensor, which had been Getty's exclusive distributor in China. Financial terms were not disclosed. Simultaneously, VCG and Getty announced an exclusive partnership giving Getty customers access to the Corbis library, which would be presented in dedicated collections on Getty's platform, alongside its hundreds of partner collections. The remaining Corbis entertainment operation announced plans to rebrand, and the Corbis name in image licensing passed into the VCG and Getty ecosystems.
Legacy
Corbis proved that a single owner with long patience could consolidate the photographic memory of the twentieth century — Bettmann, Sygma, UPI's pictures, the Ansel Adams and Warhol holdings — into one licensable library, and its cold-storage preservation of the Bettmann film remains a landmark in archival practice. It also demonstrated the limits of that model: the archive's hundred million images generated only a modest share of the market against a rival with stronger distribution. Its collections live on, licensed through Getty Images and Visual China Group, and the famous frames it owned — Einstein sticking out his tongue, Marilyn Monroe over the subway grate — continue to reach publishers through the channels its sale created.
