*Source - Much has been said about the decision by Getty Images to make available to editorial online outlets, over 35,000,000 images, for free. Well, free in the sense that you're not spending any money to use the images. However, in exchange for this, you agree to allow Getty to track all the visitors to your website. How many come, their IP addresses, how long they stay, and so on and so forth. Make no mistake about it either, this isn't "free forever", Getty is looking to get into the big-data business, connecting image viewer data with data analytics from other sources. Once they reach a critical mass of users, they will essentially be able to sell advertising alongside and beneath their images (note the big white space between their name and the social media links in all the samples everyone is sharing) and they can also sell animations, where before the image appears, an ad is displayed for a few seconds, just like the lead-in advertising on videos just like YouTube. The revenue from repeated views here is far and away greater than the few cents Getty makes from web page usage. Getty's big splash is akin to Steve Jobs keeping secret the iPhone and then getting hundreds of millions of dollars in free advertising to promote it when it launches.
