Fotolia

» see fotolia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Fotolia sold pictures by the credit. You bought a block of them up front and an image cost some number depending on size and license. The photographer who had uploaded it took a percentage that rose the more they had already sold. That was microstock, and what it did to the industry was arithmetic: the price of a usable photograph fell from hundreds of dollars to roughly one, and every agency built on the old number had to either adopt the model or go under against it.

The company was put together at the end of 2004 by Thibaud Elzière and Oleg Tscheltzoff. Patrick Chassany was the third founder. It ran out of New York with the European operation in Paris and a German office in Berlin from May 2011. By the middle of the decade it held over 34 million images and videos and was operating in twenty three countries, with sites in fourteen languages. KKR bought roughly half of it in May 2012 for $150 million.

On 11 December 2014 Adobe announced it was buying all of it for about $800 million in cash. Adobe had a hole where stock content should have been: Creative Cloud sold every tool for building a layout and nothing to put inside one. The library became Adobe Stock in 2015, and Fotolia kept running alongside it as its own storefront with its own accounts and its own credits, for the large number of customers who had no interest in a Creative Cloud subscription.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a credit bought ~

Almost nobody has a memory of licensing a stock photograph. That is what the product was for. The image arrives and the layout closes, and the whole transaction leaves no trace on either end except a line in a royalty statement.

The supply side is where the feeling was. Microstock paid in cents and rewarded volume, and Fotolia's ranking system tied your commission to how much you had already sold, so the people at the top did well and everyone below them was filling the catalog. The exclusive tier paid better and forbade selling the same file anywhere else, which is how a marketplace locks in supply without employing anybody. Fotolia is one of the rare graves where the people who lost something were suppliers rather than users.

~ the eight hundred million ~

It was a large number in 2014 and it looks larger given that the thing it bought was switched off within five years. But the price was for the catalog and for the contributors attached to it, not for the domain. Adobe needed a stock business inside Creative Cloud on a deadline, and starting from an empty library would have meant years of recruiting photographers one at a time, at a cost that makes $800 million look like the cheap option.

~ the last upload ~

The wind-down ran on published dates, which is more than most companies on this site managed. Adobe announced the closure in November 2018 and gave a full year of notice. From 5 February 2019 nothing new could be submitted through Fotolia at all; anyone still uploading had to sync their account across to the Adobe Stock contributor portal, and what was left of the Fotolia account could manage existing works and convert leftover credits back into currency.

The site went off on 5 November 2019. Type fotolia.com today and you land on stock.adobe.com with a query string on the end that reads as_content=closure_home-page. The dead domain is still reporting its own cause of death to somebody's analytics dashboard.

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