Background: Getty Images has been the go-to shop for stock photography and news images since 1995. Its library now holds 625 million images and 39 million videos, covering everything from breaking news to those suspiciously perfect office photos. Getty first listed on the Nasdaq in 1996 before being taken private and eventually returned to the public markets in 2022, listing on the NYSE at a valuation of US$2.9 billion.

What happened: Fast forward to now, and Getty has been booted off the exchange. Its shares crashed to around 12 cents, putting its market cap at just $34 million USD. The NYSE stopped trading the stock and has started the formal delisting process. Meanwhile, Getty is sitting on roughly US$1.5 billion in debt with very little cash left.

What else: Getty had a massive library and a recognisable brand, but AI has started attacking the thing that made stock photography valuable in the first place: the need to buy an image when you could simply generate one. The bigger lesson is that a moat only matters if it stays difficult to cross.

What's the key learning?

💡 A moat is whatever stops competitors from coming in and stealing your customers. For Getty, that moat was scale. It created a library that would take competitors decades, millions of photo shoots and a mountan of legal paperwork to replicate.

💡 The strongest moat can still disappear when the technology changes the game. AI doesn't need to build a photo library at all. A brand can simply type something like "diverse team high-fiving in a Melbourne laneway" and generate the image it needs, completely bypassing the old stock-photo model.

💡 When the moat gets weaker, the impact shows up in the numbers. More than 4 million advertisers were using Meta's AI ad tools by late 2025, while Getty's ad agency revenue fell 13% last quarter.