Adobe Acquires Stock Content Marketplace Fotolia For $800M In Cash

Adobe today announced that it has acquired Fotolia, a popular marketplace for stock photography and video, for approximately $800 million in cash. The idea is to integrate the service into Adobe’s Creative Cloud and make it easier for Creative Cloud members to use (and purchase) the over 34 million images and videos in the company’s portfolio.

“The acquisition of Fotolia will reinforce Creative Cloud’s role as the preeminent destination for creatives,” said David Wadhwani, the senior vice president for Digital Media at Adobe in a canned statement today. “Creative Cloud is becoming the go-to marketplace for the creative community to access images, videos, fonts and creative talent, through critical creative services like Fotolia and our new Creative Talent Search capabilities.”

Adobe’s Creative Cloud now has over 3.4 million members, as the company also today announced. It’s unclear how exactly Adobe’s subscribers will be able to access Fotolia’s content, but in a phone interview after today’s new broke, the company told me that it’s thinking about this and may offer specific subscription levels to Creative Cloud that could include access to Fotolia’s content. The company is also thinking about ways to connect Fotolia with Behance, its portfolio site, to give its subscribers new ways to monetize their work.

Adobe says that Fotolia will definitely continue as a standalone service that will remain open to anyone — Creative Cloud subscription or not.

Fotolia was founded in 2004 and has offices in New York, Paris and Berlin. The company is owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., TA Associates and management. Adobe expects the acquisition to close in Q1 2015 and says it’ll start integrating Fotolia’s content into its products soon after that.