IndiaPicture

About IndiaPicture

IndiaPicture is a New Delhi-based image stock agency that became one of India's leading suppliers of licensed photographs to the advertising, publishing and media industries. Founded by Dushyant Mehta, who serves as its chief executive, the company built what was described at the time as the largest online repository of images in South East Asia. It is best known for an exclusive partnership it signed with Corbis, the Bill Gates-owned global image company, which made IndiaPicture the sole distributor of Corbis's tens of millions of images in the Indian market. The company operates offices in Delhi and Mumbai, India's two advertising hubs.

Overview

IndiaPicture was established in the mid-2000s by Dushyant Mehta as an online media company focused on visual content. Its core business was stock photography: building a large, searchable library of Indian and international images that advertisers, publishers and media houses could license for their campaigns and publications. By late 2006, when it signed its landmark deal with Corbis, the company was already being described in industry coverage as India's leading image stock agency and the largest online repository of images in South East Asia.

The company operates from offices in Delhi and Mumbai, staffed with account management and servicing personnel, and runs on a technology platform designed to make searching and licensing images straightforward for creative-industry clients. Its catalogue combines locally produced Indian content with international imagery sourced through its global partnerships.

Founder: Dushyant Mehta

Dushyant Mehta, the co-founder and chief executive of IndiaPicture, came to the business from television and digital media rather than photography. His early career was spent as an executive producer for U.R. Productions, a production house specialising in television shows. He then worked as a freelance consultant, advising media companies on digital video technologies — a background that gave him an early grounding in the economics of rich media and content management.

In interviews around the time of the Corbis deal, Mehta described the thinking behind IndiaPicture's strategy. When the company started, he said, it generated Indian content to service the Indian industry — but over time it became clear that Indian clients could not be served with Indian content alone. They needed a holistic library that combined local imagery with international content, and that was the need the partnership with a global agency was designed to fill.

The stock photography business model

IndiaPicture's business follows the standard model of the stock-image industry. Clients — advertising agencies, corporate marketing departments, newspapers, magazines and television channels — pay a fee or licence for the right to use an image. In a partnership such as the one with Corbis, the fee is split three ways: one part goes to the photographer, one part to the partner selling the image, and one part to the partner that originated it. The model depends on scale: a vast catalogue, an efficient search and delivery platform, and a sales operation that can serve creative clients across the country.

The company targeted the organised segment of the Indian picture industry, which industry executives at the time estimated at around $10 million and expected to double within a couple of years, driven by the growth of advertising in a fast-expanding economy. The strategy for capturing that growth rested on three elements: strong content, strong customer service, and innovative services.

The Corbis partnership

In November 2006, Corbis — the digital media company owned by Bill Gates and then described as the world's second-largest stock photography company — announced an exclusive partnership with IndiaPicture.com. Under the deal, IndiaPicture became Corbis's exclusive distributor in India, introducing more than seventy million pictures from the Corbis collection to the Indian market.

The announcement was made jointly by Steve Davis, the chief executive of Corbis, and Dushyant Mehta. Davis said the company recognised India as a widespread market whose economy was growing at a healthy rate, with enormous potential in the advertising industry — growth that was being fuelled by the country's broader economic expansion. Mehta said the partnership would help the combined offering emerge as a market leader in a short span of time. Davis was reported to be targeting around fifty per cent of the organised Indian picture market.

The deal was structured so that the two companies would help each other create content, use technology well and innovate in services. For IndiaPicture, the partnership brought access to one of the world's richest image collections along with the standards and processes of a global leader; for Corbis, it brought localised service, Indian content and an established sales presence in the Indian market. The financial details of the partnership were not disclosed.

Corbis: the global partner

Corbis was founded in 1989 by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates with the aim of acquiring the digital rights to famous paintings and photographs. By the late 1990s it owned assets including the Bettmann Archive — one of the world's great historical picture libraries — and the Hammer Codex, Leonardo da Vinci's manuscript, purchased in 1995. At the time of the IndiaPicture deal, the company was headquartered in Seattle and maintained twenty-one offices across North America, Europe and Asia.

Corbis was one of two giants — the other being Getty Images, founded by Mark Getty — engaged in a battle for dominance of the global stock-photography market, then estimated at around $1 billion with annual growth of ten to fifteen per cent. The Indian partnership was part of Corbis's international expansion, bringing its collection to one of the world's fastest-growing advertising markets.

Offices and operations

IndiaPicture maintained offices in Delhi and Mumbai, the two cities that anchor India's advertising industry. The offices were staffed with account management and servicing personnel who worked directly with creative clients, supported by what the company described as a sound technology platform for searching and delivering images. The combination of local sales presence and a deep catalogue was central to its pitch: clients got both Indian content produced for the domestic market and international imagery through the Corbis relationship.

The company also invested in the technology side of the business — search, preview and delivery systems that allowed art directors and picture editors to find and license images efficiently. In an industry where speed of delivery matters as much as the quality of the image, the platform was a key part of the value proposition.

Content approach

IndiaPicture's catalogue strategy had two layers. The first was Indian content: photographs produced locally to serve the specific needs of Indian advertisers and publishers — imagery that reflected Indian faces, settings, festivals, business environments and everyday life, which international libraries of the era often lacked. The second was international content: the tens of millions of images from the Corbis collection, covering everything from historical archives to contemporary global photography.

Mehta has said that working with Corbis raised IndiaPicture's own standards — the company saw itself as privileged to partner with an industry leader, and viewed the relationship as a way to bring global best practices in content, technology and customer service to the Indian market.

Market context

The mid-2000s were a boom period for Indian advertising. Economic liberalisation had produced a fast-growing consumer market, multinational brands were expanding their Indian operations, and the media landscape — print, television and the early internet — was hungry for visual content. The organised stock-image industry was small, estimated at around $10 million, but expected to grow rapidly.

At the same time, the global stock-photography market was undergoing consolidation, with Corbis and Getty Images competing to corner archives and distribution. IndiaPicture's deal with Corbis was one of the first major moves by a global image company into the Indian market, and it positioned the Indian firm at the centre of the country's emerging picture-licensing economy.

Industry position and legacy

At the time of the Corbis deal, IndiaPicture was described by industry observers as India's leading image stock agency and the largest online image repository in South East Asia — a remarkable position for a company founded only a few years earlier. The Corbis partnership gave it the deepest catalogue available in the Indian market and a global brand association that distinguished it from smaller domestic competitors.

The company's story illustrates a broader pattern in India's media economy of the 2000s: local firms that built deep domestic capabilities and then partnered with global leaders to serve a fast-growing home market. For the advertising and publishing industries, IndiaPicture's library — and the seventy million Corbis images it made available — represented a step-change in the visual resources available to Indian creatives, bringing world-class imagery within reach of agencies and publications across the country.