
Visual content marketplace Getty Images (NYSE:GETY) fell short of the market’s revenue expectations in Q2 CY2026, with sales falling 2.5% year on year to $229.1 million. Its non-GAAP loss of $0.05 per share was significantly below analysts’ consensus estimates.
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"Our second quarter results reflected continued pressure in Agency and iStock e-commerce, while the larger parts of our business serving enterprise customers continued to demonstrate resilience and growth," said Craig Peters, Chief Executive Officer of Getty Images.
With a vast library of over 562 million visual assets documenting everything from breaking news to iconic historical moments, Getty Images (NYSE:GETY) is a global visual content marketplace that licenses photos, videos, illustrations, and music to businesses, media outlets, and creative professionals.
Reviewing a company’s long-term sales performance reveals insights into its quality. Any business can experience short-term success, but top-performing ones enjoy sustained growth for years.
With $978 million in revenue over the past 12 months, Getty Images is a small player in the business services space, which sometimes brings disadvantages compared to larger competitors benefiting from economies of scale and numerous distribution channels.
As you can see below, Getty Images grew its sales at a sluggish 2.8% compounded annual growth rate over the last five years. This shows it failed to generate demand in any major way and is a rough starting point for our analysis.
Long-term growth is the most important, but within business services, a half-decade historical view may miss new innovations or demand cycles. Getty Images’s annualized revenue growth of 3.9% over the last two years is above its five-year trend, which is encouraging. 
This quarter, Getty Images missed Wall Street’s estimates and reported a rather uninspiring 2.5% year-on-year revenue decline, generating $229.1 million of revenue.
Looking ahead, sell-side analysts expect revenue to decline by 3.6% over the next 12 months, a deceleration versus the last two years. This projection doesn’t excite us and implies its products and services will face some demand challenges.
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Adjusted operating margin is one of the best measures of profitability because it tells us how much money a company takes home after subtracting all core expenses, like marketing and R&D. It also removes various one-time costs to paint a better picture of normalized profits.
Getty Images has been an efficient company over the last five years. It was one of the more profitable businesses in the business services sector, boasting an average adjusted operating margin of 16.3%.
Looking at the trend in its profitability, Getty Images’s adjusted operating margin decreased by 13.5 percentage points over the last five years. This raises questions about the company’s expense base because its revenue growth should have given it leverage on its fixed costs, resulting in better economies of scale and profitability.
In Q2, Getty Images generated an adjusted operating margin profit margin of 12.7%, down 2.5 percentage points year on year. This contraction shows it was less efficient because its expenses increased relative to its revenue.
Revenue trends explain a company’s historical growth, but the long-term change in earnings per share (EPS) points to the profitability of that growth — for example, a company could inflate its sales through excessive spending on advertising and promotions.
Getty Images’s full-year EPS flipped from negative to breakeven over the last three years. This is encouraging and shows it’s at a critical moment in its life.
Like with revenue, we analyze EPS over a more recent period because it can provide insight into an emerging theme or development for the business.
For Getty Images, its two-year annual EPS declines of 100% mark a reversal from its (seemingly) healthy three-year trend. We hope Getty Images can return to earnings growth in the future.
In Q2, Getty Images reported adjusted EPS of negative $0.05, down from $0.05 in the same quarter last year. This print missed analysts’ estimates, but we care more about long-term adjusted EPS growth than short-term movements. We also like to analyze expected EPS growth based on Wall Street analysts’ consensus projections, but there is insufficient data.
We struggled to find many positives in these results. Its revenue missed and its EPS fell short of Wall Street’s estimates. Overall, this was a softer quarter. The stock traded down 15.2% to $0.38 immediately after reporting.
Getty Images’s latest earnings report disappointed. One quarter doesn’t define a company’s quality, so let’s explore whether the stock is a buy at the current price. When making that decision, it’s important to consider its valuation, business qualities, as well as what has happened in the latest quarter. We cover that in our actionable full research report which you can read here (it’s free).