IStock
microstock photography website
iStock is an online royalty free, international microstock photography provider based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
History
The company was founded by Bruce Livingstone in May 2000, as iStockphoto, a free stock imagery website supported by Livingstone's web development firm, Evolvs Media. iStock pioneered the crowd-sourced stock industry and became the original source for user-generated stock photos, vectors and illustrations, and video clips. It began charging money in 2001 and quickly became profitable.
On February 9, 2006, the firm was acquired by Getty Images for US$50 million. Livingstone promised that the site would continue "functioning independently with the benefits of Getty Images, yet, very importantly for them and us, autonomy."
On September 18, 2006, the site experienced the first benefits of the new ownership: a controlled-vocabulary keyword taxonomy borrowed from Getty Images.
iStockpro was a more expensive version of iStockphoto that was never as popular. It closed in 2007, having become redundant after the acquisition by Getty Images.
On April 1, 2008, Getty Images disclosed, as part of its agreement to be sold to a private equity firm, that iStockphoto's revenue in 2007 was US$71.9 million of which US$20.9 million (29%) was paid to contributors.
Founder and CEO Livingstone left iStockphoto in 2009.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “IStock” is microstock photography website. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through IStock, microstock and photography, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “microstock photography website” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q225613. VIAF identifies the subject as 133551714. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2001, 2006 and 2007.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “IStock” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.