Getty Images the photo stock giant have actually found a company to purchase them at a premium price. It is being reported that Getty Images has been purchased for $2.4 billion to private equity firm Hellman and Friedman. The $34/share price is a 39% premium over Friday’s close, and more than 50% higher than GYI’s price in mid-January, when the sale started.
The New York times reports that Getty Images is now up for sale. The world’s biggest supplier of pictures and video to media and advertising companies, has put itself on the auction block and could fetch more than $1.5 billion, people briefed on the situation said Sunday.
Getty was founded back in 1995 and current has a catalogue of 3.2 billion images and 4 million unique visitors to its website each month. These figures make the company very lucrative. Goldman Sachs was hired to advise it on a potential sale and Getty has already attracted several potential buyers, mostly private equity firms, including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Bain Capital and others.
Bids for the company are due to be finalised by the end of the month. A sale is not assured, but with this high end company being up for grabs, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few private equity firms join forces to finalise a sale.
There has been a buzz around the blogosphere in the last day or so about Pump Audio and how they have finally been intergrated with Getty Images. As most of us know Pump Audio was purchase by Getty Images for about $42 million. Pump has a catalog of approx 20,000 independent artists in which their music is licensed for use on the Web, TV or Radio. Pump’s customers range from major TV shows like The Colbert Report to advertising agencies and podcasters.
Getty yesterday announced that they have re-launched Pump Audio under the name Soundtrack on the Getty site. This must be the most over-hyped event from Getty in a very long time and I cant believe the blogosphere (Techcrunch, Mashable) has jumped onboard. It is as if Soundtrack was a completely new product and it has just be released, but that is the complete opposite to what has really happened. Soundtrack is a tool designed by Pump Audio most before the purchase and I have been using Soundtrack for the last six months or so. All Getty has done is place a link on their site to the Soundtrack tool. So why the hell is this getting blog and press coverage??
