Among its acquisitions were the 11 million piece Bettmann Archive, acquired in 1995; the Sygma collection in France (1999); and the German stock image company ZEFA (2005).

In January 2016, Corbis announced that it had sold its image licensing businesses to Unity Glory International, an affiliate of Visual China Group.

[6] BEN directly represents the personality rights of various figures, including Albert Einstein, Buzz Aldrin, Sophia Loren, Charlie Chaplin, Maria Callas, Andy Warhol, Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Muhammad Ali, Steve McQueen, and Thomas Edison among others.

[12] The archive was stored 220 feet underground in a refrigerated cave in the Iron Mountain storage facility,[13] In 1995, the company won a contract with its first major photographer, Roger Ressmeyer, followed by several more, including Galen Rowell; this signalled growing interest in the world of professional photography, which up to that point had not taken the company seriously.

[17] In 1998, another division was added to Corbis Images when the company acquired Outline Press Syndicate, Inc., a supplier of celebrity portrait photography.

Renamed Corbis Outline, the company syndicated studio portraits and candid photographs of actors, musicians, athletes, politicians, business leaders, scientists, and other celebrities and provided the images for sale to a broad range of national magazines.

[20] In 2000, Microsoft (a fellow venture of Gates) purchased the rights through Corbis to the image Bucolic Green Hills, which it renamed to Bliss for the default wallpaper of Windows XP.

The image was taken in the Los Carneros American Viticultural Area of Sonoma County, California, United States by photographer Charles O'Rear in 1996, who previously sent it to Westlight which Corbis had acquired in 1998.

Of the deal, Getty CEO Jonathan Klein remarked that after 21 years in business, it was "lovely to get the milk, the cream, cheese, yogurt and the meat without buying the cow.

CEO Gary Shenk stated that the company had organized over 5,000 brand placements in 2015, with clients including Cadillac, Jose Cuervo, Microsoft, and others.