Founded by another very rich guy (Mark Getty, scion of the Getty oil fortune), it has slightly fewer images in its library but a revenue stream that's more than three times bigger. Together, Corbis and Getty stand astride the world of photography like twin colossi, commissioning new photos and selling millions of archival images a year to magazines, newspapers, and ad agencies around the world.

And it seemed as though they would dominate the field forever--before guys like Oleg Tscheltzoff came along.
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Tscheltzoff is the president of Fotolia, one of a new breed of so-called microstock houses--born of the Internet and Web 2.0--that are challenging the giants and could soon start cutting into their market share.

While the big two offer exclusives on great photos at prices that range from a few hundred dollars to more than $10,000 apiece, these startups sell pretty good pictures for a good deal less--often just a dollar or two. Unlike Getty and Corbis, which compete fiercely to work with the top artists, the microstock firms get most of their photos the way Wikipedia gets its entries, by "crowdsourcing" work from interested amateurs or beginning pros.

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