Behind the scenes at the Getty Images purchase

Paid Content has an interesting article about the Getty Images sale and purchase. Back in September, Goldman Sachs made a presentation to the Getty board. After Goldman Sachs realized that companies like Adobe were not interested in bidding, they started looking for private equity solutions.

One interesting graphic from the SEC filing is this chart showing the projected revenue streams over time (clicking on the chart will enlarge it). Notice the drop in "Creative Stills" and the growth of iStock Photo and all the other categories.

Adjusted Gross Revenue is expected to drop from 41% to 8.8% in the next 4 years (before the "recession" is figured in).

This is probably an educated guess to how the entire photo industry will fare in the next few years.