For Sale: Getty Images

"getty-up!" by Dean Forbes, from Flickr via Creative Commons license. Yes, the irony is thick.
Fremont's own Getty Images wants to auction itself off and could sell for up to $1.5 billion, reports the NY Times. The stock photo agency has had a rough go of it lately:

But the rise of digital photography and the Web created a host of competitors that charged as little as a dollar for an image. Recent events — from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister, to the latest foibles of the entertainer Britney Spears — have led to a surging popularity of low-quality but on-the-scene photos, many taken by cellphone cameras.

“Getty Images continues to be a company in transition, adjusting from being the leading player in an oligopolistic market to being one of many players in a highly competitive market,” Barbara Coffey, a research analyst with Kaufman Brothers, wrote in a research note earlier this month.

It’s not just the photo market that’s in transition, of course, but the entire field of photography. Getty grew first because it had the capital to buy smaller agencies and digitize their content, and later because it pioneered selling content on the Internet. Now technology has made it possible for many smaller agencies to sell imagery on the Web.

For photographers, all this has been a mixed blessing. The Internet has created sales possibilities for large numbers of shooters in places all around the globe—and in that sense it has been a democratizing force. At the same time, as the price of imagery has been continually driven lower by competition, professional photographers have seen their incomes drop.

UPDATE: PDN Pulse, the Photo District News blog, thinks the Times may be overstating the effect cell phone cameras have had on Getty's business model:

It's a popular opinion that amateurs with cell phone cameras are killing the professional photo agencies, but the evidence is thin. And these two examples don't even make sense. The Britney downfall has been covered mainly by professional paparazzi, who do not use cellphone cameras. And while there were some important amateur videos of the Bhutto assassination, professional journalists played a larger role in documenting what happened. Indeed, splashed across the front page of The New York Times the next day was an on-the-scene photo shot by John Moore of Getty Images.