iStock turns 9!

Gather 'round, young'uns, and let me tell you all a story.

You probably know at least the jist of the story already. In 2000 (it might have been 1999, depending on who you ask) you had a bunch of guys working together at a Calgary web-design company called Evolvs, which was owned by a guy named Bruce. Bruce and his pal Brad both took a lot of photos — lomographs of New York City, guys with guitars, cute girls in wigs sitting in front of Apple computers — you know, stock.

He'd actually started another company, Frequency Labs, (which may also have been a record label) and this company had a product: boxes and boxes full of compact discs with all of those photographs. At the last minute though, Bruce decided that selling CDs just wasn't going to work. So he created a website instead. The photographs all went up, and they weren't even for sale: designers could download them for free. He called it iStockphoto.com and it went live on April 7th, 2000.

Here's the view from August, 2000, which is about the furthest back the Wayback Machine can take us and actually load the page. As you can gather from that great Zeldman plug, we were all free back then. Just a bunch of designers with digital cameras who wanted to share their pictures with each other to get around the prohibitive costs of traditional stock.

It didn't take very long at all before the amount traffic all this free photo swapping was generating started to seriously overwhelm the guys at Webcore (another one of Bruce's companies. Talk about your entrepreneurs...) Not only that, it was costing a pile of money just to keep things running. When the bandwidth bill hit $10,000 it became clear that if the site was going to continue, there was going to have to be some money changing hands. A few different ideas were floated initially...

...but when the right idea came, it was a good one.

We decided to go ahead with charging for our files. Now you could spend money to get credits, and a photograph would run you about 25 cents. No one was really sure what would happen, and no one expected what did: the site exploded. Suddenly we were busier than ever. Photographers were getting paid.

At the beginning of 2003, things were starting to look a little more familiar. We had an Image of the Week up there at the top of the page. We were closing in on 34,000 files. People complained about there being more than 500 files in the Queue. We were all excited about something called iStockpro (which we've now, collectively, all forgotten. Seriously, let's not talk about it.)

And if you scroll down a little ways in the blog there, you'll see that people have been linking to Zombo com forever around here.

By August of 2003 we'd made a lot of changes: new logo, new colours (you could pick your own! Web 2.0!) and a whole lot of new OTWs. We were the Designer's Dirty Little Secret.

The forums had gotten pretty lively. Note that Rob has been answering the same questions for at least 6 years now.

By 2005 we were just one site-redesign away from the current version. We'd blown up to become the busiest stock site out there, with more artists selling more files than anybody would have ever thought possible. The whole landscape of the industry had changed, and all kinds of words (Microstock, Crowdsourcing) had to be coined just to describe what we were doing.

In February of 2006, iStock was purchased by Getty Images. We'd gone from upstart to fixture in just a few years. Since then, we've continued to grow at a pretty remarkable rate, adding video & audio to the collection, bringing in the Controlled Vocabulary, and translating the site into 9 languages.

So there you go: 9 years old. A lot has happened: Galleries became Public Lightboxes. Why? No one can remember. BuyRequest came and went. Some artists sold so many pictures we had to invent new canister colours. "iStockalypse" started out as a few people staying on Peebert's couch and grew into the good-times behemoth it is today. We invented new words (h*ck!), appropriated some other ones (Punctum? I hardly know 'em), and somebody even wrote a book about us.

Happy Birthday, you old bastard.