Comments for Corbis Offers Free Photos to Bloggers - With a Catch

Corbis Offers Free Photos to Bloggers - With a Catch

2007-11-28T16:28:42Z

The world's second largest stock photo firm, Corbis, will soon begin giving away free some of its high quality stock photographs to bloggers via a partnership with newly launched site PicApp. PicApp is a new startup that aims to give bloggers and small media producers legal access to previously unaffordable stock photographs for free, in exchange for displaying advertising.

The PicApp system, which is still in closed beta, works by embedding overlay or popup advertising in images that bloggers can then run on their sites free of charge. Further, bloggers can reportedly earn a slice of the revenue on those photos based on how many people click on the ads in the images. Corbis is the first major content partner revealed to be working with PicApp -- the company promises that more are coming soon.

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According to PicApp, "most of the visual content found online is some kind of a misuse or an infringement of copyright," which leads to a massive loss of revenue for content creators. Small media publishers, though, need access to high end visual content, but most of it is well out of their price range (royalty free images at Corbis often run $50-100 for the lowest quality version of a single image). PicApp aims to make these images accessible to bloggers by subsidizing their cost with advertising. At right you can see a sample of a PicApp image that I yanked from their blog (roll your mouse of the bottom of the image to see where, presumably, an advertisement might appear).

"We work with a partner so that those pictures are tracked, and if they're being used illegally, we can figure that out," said Corbis CEO Gary Shenk at the Reuters Media Summit on Tuesday, reports Reuters. "But as long as they are downloaded through this application, you're legit and you're ready to go."

Corbis has been making a major push this year to catch up to Getty Images, their chief competitor and the largest stock photography distributor. Getty is about three times as large as Corbis (in terms of revenue). Earlier this month Corbis announced that it had acquired Veer, a boutique stock image distribution web site, and last June in launched SnapVillage, a micropayment stock photos web site that competes with Getty's very popular iStockPhoto.

Though the quality of the images offered by professional stock photo outfits like Corbis, Getty and JupiterImages is unrivaled, there are plenty of low-cost or free alternatives out there for bloggers. Because bloggers publish to the web, they don't need the highest quality images, and good quality photos are available on the cheap from sites like iStockPhoto, SnapVillage or StockXpert. Further, many free stock photo sites offer a large number of quality images with no strings attached (we reviewed five stock photo search engines last June that can help you find them), and Flickr has a bevy of images just waiting to be used with credit. What's more appealing to bloggers, slightly lower quality, low-cost or free images, or professional images that come saddled with rollover ads?

Comment from Ashley on 2007-11-29

2007-11-29T19:38:24Z

As a photographer who shoots stock for a living I have just one question which seems to have been completely overlooked in this discussion. How much will the photographer be paid when these images are used for free by the bloggers?

Comment from Peter Cooper on 2007-11-29

2007-11-29T18:02:06Z

I forgot to mention it Phil, but you're totally right. That's the only reason I ended up having to view the page on the actual Web site here.. because it made no sense in Google Reader due to the broken JavaScript. With feed subscribers now becoming more important than regular Web hits (at least, for many popular blogs), PicApp isn't going to get very far with the bigger bloggers unless they switch to using a YouTube-esque Flash inclusion technique (which Google Reader seems to support).

Comment from Jared on 2007-11-28

2007-11-29T04:45:48Z

Isn't the point of using an image in a blog post to draw the reader's attention to the post?

This seems like the image draws attention to the ad and thus detracts the reader's attention from the post.

I don't see the motivation for bloggers to use this when there are better alternatives out there like Peter mentioned.

Comment from Phil on 2007-11-28

2007-11-28T22:11:14Z

I'm not a fan of this. I got caught by your feed when it read as follows:

According to PicApp, "most of the visual content JavaScript is not enabled or supported on your browser found online is some kind of a misuse or an infringement of copyright," which leads to a massive loss of

That was really confusing and is the direct result of the JavaScript that provides the image not playing in feedreaders.

Another pet peeve of mine is using useless images in posts, images that mean nothing. I can't imagine how the image you use as an example could ever be used meaningfully. So this service is promoting using JavaScript to include meaningless images that confuse your subscribed readers.

Thumbs down :(

Comment from Peter Cooper on 2007-11-28

2007-11-28T18:11:48Z

I initially thought this was really cool, and.. it's still kinda cool, but I realized that Corbis's library isn't that great, and you can get keenly priced monthly / annual subscriptions for nearly unlimited use of other stock libraries, like Photos.com or Shutterstock. The quality of competing stock libraries has risen significantly in the last several years and Corbis is becoming less relevant.

I'm not sure if this development is enough to reverse the slide, since if I /really/ wanted to use high quality art on a regular basis, I'd buy it like you say, or just subscribe to a site that lets me download it whenever I want for no extra charge. I'd also worry that this sort of "free" usage is going to ultimately reduce the value of their library if it takes off, as professional buyers aren't going to want to pay to use photography they've seen being used for free all over blogs / MySpace / wherever.