All across the industry content providers are seeing a sudden drop in sales.

In my opinion, it's for but one reason:

Getty has put their entire inventory out for free for bloggers.

We know about the issues of internet image theft but there ARE tens of thousands of HONEST bloggers who paid for the Rights to use images.

If you're a blogger who's been paying for images and suddenly have 35 million free images to choose from, what are you going to do?

Getty is getting revenue from ad/content linking but it can't be anything close to the revenue lost from the blogger market. At least Getty can suffer financially from their stupidity.

If Getty has any sort of brains (or at least en eye on the bottom line) they will rescind this decision. The issue of image theft is a much smaller problem than losing a percentage of income, right?

For now, it remains to be seen if the Stupid continues.