Corbis, started by Bill Gates in 1989, owns millions of images, some of them kept underground in a former limestone mine in rural Pennsylvania - reports in an article by New York Times. Mr. Gates started Corbis in 1989 with the idea that people would someday decorate their homes with a revolving display of digital artwork.
Corbis has spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring image collections and other companies, hired more than 1,000 people and set up two dozen offices worldwide. NY Times, further says that, although Corbis brings in some $250 million a year in sales, it has yet to turn a profit. Meanwhile Corbis has built up a formidable stash of historical photos, including those in the Bettmann Archive. In 1999, Corbis acquired the licensing rights to the Sygma collection in France, and two years ago it did the same with a German stock image company called Zefa. It licenses those images for an average of about $250 apiece.
The archival photos bring in about half of Corbis’s sales, but the company also has a stable of professional photographers who generate stock photos for advertising and media clients — images of children on playgrounds, people sitting in business meetings and men in khakis swinging golf clubs. Over the past few years, Corbis has moved beyond newspaper and magazine clients to pursue advertising and graphic design agencies, as well as corporate marketing departments, which are turning increasingly to high-quality stock photography rather than doing their own expensive photo shoots. Those customers are also buying from Corbis’s growing library of 30,000 short video clips — mostly generic scenes of, say, people shopping or running down the beach.
The Corbis photographs themselves are not stored in Seattle, except digitally on the computers there. And those digital images constitute only a small fraction of Corbis’s holdings. Of the 50 million items in the Sygma collection, just 800,000 have been digitized. As ventures go, Corbis represents a small investment for Mr. Gates. He pays for large expenditures, and the company uses its revenues to cover smaller projects within the firm.
Read the NY Times article - A Photo Trove, a Mounting Challenge.
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