With its 70-billion-yuan market value completely wiped out, another long-established industry giant has gone bankrupt.

Getty Images, a name almost universally known in the visual creative industry, has recently officially filed for bankruptcy application with the court.

Getty Images has been the "world's largest image library" since 1998. When it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2022, its market value once exceeded 11 billion U.S. dollars (about 73 billion yuan). On September 29, the NYSE suspended its trading and initiated delisting on the grounds that its stock price had fallen to 12 cents. Its final stock price was 0.014 U.S. dollars, and its market value was only 5.89 million U.S. dollars.

For a long time, the image library business has been regarded as a rare high-margin profitable business — after accumulating enough copyrighted images, you can collect revenue passively with a steady stream of income. Many people in China have actually dealt with Getty. In 2005, Getty Images established a joint venture Imagine China with Visual China Group, responsible for the local sales of its content in China. Although Imagine China was later fully acquired by Visual China, it has always held the authorization of Getty Images in China. Over the past decade, many stories circulating on the Chinese internet such as "claiming 10,000 yuan for one image" and "being approached for using public account illustrations without permission" can be traced back to this authorization chain.

Data from Qichacha shows that Imagine China is currently a micro-enterprise with only 7 employees participating in social insurance, but it has 6,592 legal lawsuits under its name, which shows how "prosperous" its business is.

But why did such a profitable business go from its peak to bankruptcy in just four years?

Collecting copyrights worldwide and selling them for 30 years

In 1995, 34-year-old Mark Getty founded Getty Communications in London, the predecessor of Getty Images. Mark Getty was born into a famous oil tycoon family, and his grandfather J. Paul Getty was once the richest man in the United States and even the world in the 1950s and 1960s.

Mark Getty had a very clear plan for the development model of Getty Communications. He did not plan to hire a group of photographers to take photos like other photo agencies, but directly adopted the "buy buy buy" model. The first thing Getty Communications did after its establishment was to acquire Tony Stone Images, a long-established London photo agency with about 2.5 million photos, for 40 million U.S. dollars. Then in the next five years, Getty Communications completed about 30 acquisitions intensively, including Hulton Deutsch, one of the world's largest private photography archives, Liaison Agency, a leading global news material supplier, Fabulous Footage, a leading contemporary image supplier in North America, and many others.

Through these aggressive acquisitions, Getty Communications became the world's largest visual content provider in the third year after its establishment, and was renamed Getty Images. Before the birth of Getty Images, due to the lack of convenient internet, the global visual content industry was relatively scattered, with a large number of small and medium-sized photo agencies as the main players. Mark Getty saw this clearly, proposed to be the "integrator of the visual content industry", and he did achieve it.

After 2000, Getty Images already had a huge copyright library covering various types of images and videos including archives, news, celebrity materials, sports, entertainment, and creative content, with more than 60 million static images and more than 30,000 hours of footage. News media, advertising and marketing companies, publishing houses, digital media and other organizations around the world basically cannot avoid buying copyrights from Getty Images.

With a solid moat and healthy cash flow, Getty Images was naturally targeted by PE giants. In 2008, the famous PE giant Hellman & Friedman acquired Getty Images for about 2.4 billion U.S. dollars. In 2012, Hellman & Friedman sold it to another PE giant The Carlyle Group at a valuation of 3.3 billion U.S. dollars.

Under the operation of the two PE giants, Getty Images continued to expand through large-scale horizontal mergers and acquisitions. On July 25, 2022, Getty Images was listed on the New York Stock Exchange via a SPAC transaction. The valuation at the time of the merger was 4.8 billion U.S. dollars, and its market value exceeded 11 billion U.S. dollars at its highest after listing. At that time, it claimed to control more than 660 million images and video materials, cooperate with more than 600,000 content creators such as photographers, and add more than 10 million new copyrighted materials every quarter.

In 2025, Getty Images recorded its highest annual revenue in its 30-year history — 980 million U.S. dollars, a year-on-year increase of 4.5%.

However, only eight months later, it appeared in the bankruptcy court.

Another victim in the AI era

On Getty Images' road to bankruptcy, AI is an unavoidable factor.

Back to January 2023, Getty Images sued Stability AI, a well-known text-to-image AI model company, in courts in the UK and the United States. At that time, the company's Stable Diffusion model was sweeping the world, marking the arrival of the AIGC era.

The impact of AIGC on traditional image libraries is obvious: the cost of generating images with AI may only be a few cents, and naturally no one will buy copyrighted images that often cost 10 U.S. dollars for a single license. AIGC has also changed customers' workflows. Now when customers have demands, they first turn to AI for generation instead of looking for old images in image libraries. This instantly disintegrated the moat advantage built by Getty Images with its huge image library, especially for creative images that contributed more than half of Getty Images' revenue.

Therefore, Getty Images immediately took up legal weapons to safeguard its rights. Basically, whether it is Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, or OpenAI's image generation model DALL·E at that time, a large number of image data were crawled from the internet for training, and it is almost certain that they used Getty Images' copyrighted images.

Getty Images chose Stability AI as the litigation target, mainly because Stable Diffusion is an open-source model, the results are easy to reproduce, which is convenient for evidence collection. In addition, the early model of Stable Diffusion was indeed too problematic, and the output images even frequently showed the "Getty Images" watermark.

But the result of the lawsuit was disappointing. What Getty Images hoped was that the court would regard the use of Getty Images' images for model training as infringement, so that it could get copyright royalties from all image outputs of the model. However, the final judgment of the UK court finally ruled that the weights of the large model do not "store or copy" the original copyrighted works, so it is not infringement. The watermarks that appeared were only regarded as limited trademark infringement. This judgment basically completely shattered Getty Images' hope of getting a share from AI companies.

While the lawsuit was lost, AI began to erode Getty Images' revenue in real terms. Before 2022, except for 2020 when the impact of the epidemic was the most severe, Getty Images' revenue basically maintained a high single-digit growth, with a year-on-year increase of 12.7% in 2021. But starting from 2022, Getty Images' revenue growth momentum has slowed down significantly or even declined. The growth rates from 2022 to 2024 were 0.8%, -1.0%, and 2.5% respectively.

In 2024, Getty Images' Agency business (mainly for advertising and marketing customers) and iStock business (mainly for e-commerce) both recorded a cliff-like decline of more than 40%, which was disastrous. The good news is that the core Premium Creative business performed relatively stably, which mainly serves brand customers with higher requirements for quality and copyright.

In 2025, Getty Images' revenue increased by 4.5%, which seemed to rebound. But in fact, the growth was mainly driven by two major licensing agreements. One agreement allowed a social media giant to display its copyrighted content on its products, and the other authorized an AI giant to use its data. Excluding the revenue from these two agreements, the growth rate of its core business was actually -1.4%.

Facing the impact of AI, Getty Images did try to find solutions. At the beginning of its establishment, Getty Images was a pioneer in the digital transformation of visual content, taking the lead in using the internet to distribute digital copyrights, which was also a major reason for its success back then. In the AI era, Getty Images reacted quickly too. In 2023, it cooperated with NVIDIA to launch Generative AI by Getty Images, promising to train the model only with its own copyright library, providing full compensation for commercial use, and sharing revenue with content creators whose works are included in the training set, but this product did not gain much traction.

Can it be reborn after bankruptcy?

Of course, the impact of AI alone would not have made Getty Images go bankrupt so quickly. Getty Images' own business model and two acquisitions by PE institutions have planted a hidden mine for it — debt. As mentioned earlier, Getty Images' expansion mainly relied on horizontal mergers and acquisitions, which required capital and inevitably led to accumulated debt.

In 2008, when Getty Images was taken private by Hellman & Friedman, its book debt was 265 million U.S. dollars, which was relatively normal. During the period when Hellman & Friedman held the company, Getty Images completed at least two large dividend recapitalizations (that is, borrowing new debt to pay dividends to shareholders), with a total amount of nearly 900 million U.S. dollars. When The Carlyle Group took over in 2012, the total debt financing amounted to 2.6 billion U.S. dollars (including refinancing of old debts), and the leverage ratio rose to 7.1 times EBITDA.

When Getty Images re-listed in 2022, the total debt disclosed was 1.757 billion U.S. dollars. After that, the debt level decreased to some extent through raising funds to repay debts after listing. But after 2023, as interest rates rose and revenue declined, its debt level rose again. As of the first half of 2026, its debt scale was 2.1 billion U.S. dollars, and the interest expense was 111.5 million U.S. dollars, resulting in a net loss of 85.8 million U.S. dollars for the company.

In other words, Getty Images encountered the AI shock at its most financially vulnerable time, which is the full attribution of its path to bankruptcy. The biggest impact of AI is not the blow to its revenue, but the destruction of its valuation, which blocked its refinancing channel. And its debt structure requires it to continue to complete refinancing, otherwise bankruptcy is inevitable.

Of course, filing for bankruptcy does not mean the end of Getty Images. According to the pre-signed restructuring agreement, the Getty family will join hands with new investors to inject up to 676 million U.S. dollars into Getty Images and retain controlling rights. All types of creditors have accepted principal write-downs, interest rate cuts and maturity extensions to varying degrees, but the rights and interests of public shareholders will be wiped out.

After filing for bankruptcy, founder Mark Getty stated that the company remains the "unrivaled leader in premium visual content". At this moment, Getty Images' premium subscription business and its Editorial business, which mainly provides real-time news photos, can still generate stable cash flow, and it will not be a big problem to return to profitability after debt restructuring. But in the long run, Getty Images still needs to find its own place to survive in the AI era.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "ChinaVenture", author: Tao Huidong, editor: Wang Qingwu, published with authorization from 36Kr.