iStock: A Decade of Photo Sharing [INFOGRAPHIC]

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In a decade that heralded the meteoric rise of social media, the iStock reached more than a few notable milestones (see infographic below). For starters, in the wake of the dot-com crash, the company managed to become profitable shortly after announcing it would charge users a fee for downloading each image.

A few years and half a million users later, the company was acquired by stock photo giant Getty Images. The acquisition led to the integration of Getty's "controlled vocabulary" technology, which allowed iStock to be searchable in a variety of languages used around the globe, from Brazil to Japan.

But iStock's progress hasn't just been good for iStock. One of the service's power users, Lise Gagne, sold her 500,000th image in June 2007. And just last month, the company launched a free database of images for Blogger.com users.

This month marks iStock's 10th birthday -- a decade of progress through the dot-com days to the rise of social media. Not many startups from the class of 2000 can claim the same.

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image courtesy of iStockphoto, kvadrat1

Disclosure: iStock is a Mashable partner.