With Getty at the helm, there is an opportunity to consolidate and optimize these assets to extend joint organic growth potential.
Other notable players
Additional competitors in the space include:
- Freepik: Specializes in free and premium vectors, illustrations, and templates, primarily targeting designers; owns several local brands, especially in Latin America and Europe. Leans heavily into AI-generated content for SEO.
- Pexels and Pixabay (owned by Canva): Provide free-to-use stock photography and videos, appealing to casual users and professionals alike.
- Adobe Stock: Integrated with Adobe’s suite of design tools, catering to professional creators.
- Alamy, Dreamstime, DepositPhotos, 123RF: Smaller, more niche platforms offering royalty-free stock content.
Dig deeper: Visual content and SEO: How to use images and videos
While these players dominate the licensable media space, their success relies heavily on effective SEO strategies that cater to a wide range of user intents.
1. Free content
Platforms like Unsplash, Pexels, Freepik, Pixabay, and several others rely on offering free content and/or some form of freemium models, which help build an impressive backlink ecosystem through free content sharing.
At one point, nearly two-thirds of the more prominent players in the organic licensable images space offered at least some free, mid- to high-resolution images that could be easily downloaded without sign-up, registration, or licensing.
2. Indexed search results
Companies like Shutterstock, Unsplash, Pixabay and many other marketplaces rely on indexing internal search pages.
