iStock

In 2000, Bruce Livingstone founded iStockphoto in Calgary, Canada. The website began as a side project: he was then working at a design firm, which gave away the many photos it shot once it had used them, and the site evolved into a community where users downloaded each other’s photos and exchanged images for credits. In late 2000, the site received a hosting bill of about $10,000, and Livingstone decided to charge for download credits, starting at 25 cents and returning 20% to photographers. From then on, photographers submitted images to the site, which sold them at royalty-free, low-priced rates, with photographers receiving a share of each transaction.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][2]

On February 9, 2006, Getty Images acquired iStockphoto, Inc. for $50 million, of which $45.7 million was paid at closing and the remaining $4.3 million was held in escrow, to be released after certain former shareholder employees remained with the company. At the time, iStockphoto was a privately held company based in Calgary that licensed royalty-free imagery exclusively through istockphoto.com and istockpro.com and described itself as having pioneered the micropayment model that let buyers license images for as little as a dollar; after the acquisition it continued operating as a separate brand, with Livingstone staying on as CEO. Getty Images positioned it as a channel for selling work by amateur, enthusiast, and semi-professional photographers.⁠[3][3][3][4][4][1][5]

A year after the acquisition, Livingstone took on two additional roles that required him to move to Seattle; by late March 2009, he had resigned from all of his positions. He said iStock had matured into a large business and needed a change in senior management.⁠[1][1][1]

On January 16, 2023, iStockphoto LP, the entity operating iStock, together with several Getty Images companies, sued Stability AI Limited in the High Court of England and Wales, alleging that it had reproduced approximately 12 million images and their captions without authorization to train the image generation model Stable Diffusion.⁠[6][6][7]

In the second quarter of 2026, Getty Images’ creative revenue fell 2.6% year over year on a reported basis to $127.4 million, mainly because revenue from the iStock e-commerce platform decreased by $7.4 million.⁠[8][8][8]

As of 2026, iStock is one of Getty Images’ three brands, alongside Getty Images and Unsplash, positioned as an affordable offering of creative images and video that provides a large volume of exclusive content to small and medium-sized businesses; customers can buy individually or choose monthly or annual subscriptions, which cover images, video, and music. Users can also generate images with Generative AI by iStock, which is trained on Getty Images creative content and designed to be commercially safe, but the iStock library itself does not accept AI-generated visuals.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][7]

iStock: Official website: https://www.istock.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6]

X: Public account: https://x.com/istock (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/istockphoto/ (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/istock (opens in a new window)⁠[7]