From Plaintiff to Partner: PicApp's Photographers Embrace WordPress

Written by Dana Oshiro / October 6, 2009 2:52 PM / 7 Comments

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Early this morning PicApp announced a partnership with Automattic and integration with WordPress. More than 7.5 million publishers on WordPress' hosted service will gain access to 20 million stock images from services like Getty, Corbis and Jupiter Images. The one caveat with these images is that there is advertising embedded in them. While the blogosphere continues to debate the depth of image content, the true significance of the announcement is rooted in the fact that a new era of collaboration is upon us.

In the past, photography sites have looked to PicApp's Israeli parent company PicScout to monitor the web for copyright infringements. Once infringers were identified, rights owners would serve DMCA takedown notices to bloggers and small publishers. Today's partnership with one of the world's top blogging platform casts aside this adversarial approach and gives bloggers the respect they deserve as legitimate publishers, influencers and even partners.

As covered by ReadWriteWeb in the past, PicApp has made efforts to differentiate itself from its parent copyright monitoring company. The company continues to collaborate with bloggers through its image sharing platform in exchange for links back to photography sites and advertisements. Since 2007, the company has signed a slew of new publishers and significantly increased its content. While some bloggers may grumble that the advertising is unsightly, there's no denying that these simple embed codes shave precious minutes off a post. PicApp offers great quality photographs and automatic attribution and legal clearance. For professional bloggers this service can be a lifesaver for breaking news.

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The content is great. But 1.) I am not able to control what is shown on my blog 2.) I don’t want a flash backdoor on my site used to push ads.

Are there any alternatives … ?

Posted by: Phil v. Sassen | October 6, 2009 3:25 PM

So what happens when they stop suppling an image that I'm linking to? I don't want dead links on my site.
Or am I allowed to copy the image to my site?

When I use the embed code they supply, I don't see ads, just thumbnails to other images. Does the WordPress.com site embed do it differently?

I've got questions, but only because I'm liking what I'm seeing?

Gary from http://GarySaid.com/

Posted by: Gary LaPointe | October 6, 2009 4:01 PM

Hey Folks,
Because these are Getty images etc. I've not heard of a case where the images have ever been removed. As far as I know you can't copy the image to your site, but you can pay for a $30-50 per month unlimited download on web-based images from one of the partner services. You can also pull images from Flickr using a CC search and for the most part you just have to give attribution. As for advertising: The most I've seen appear is a link back to one of the partner photo sites.

Posted by: Dana Oshiro | October 6, 2009 4:29 PM

To Phil, let me clarify-- if you searched picapp for "Tiger woods" and posted an image, we will show a strip as overlay on the published image, the thumbnail images appearing on the strip always match your search term, in this example, additional images of Tiger Woods. So you don't really lose control over what is shown.

The way we look at it is that you're presenting your post readers with an opportunity to further get engaged with the post thru our image. Ads do not appear as overlay or below the published image to not interfere with blog context.
When a viewer clicks the thumbnail/s he/she is directed to a secondary page showing additional images (again- matching your search term) appearing in full size. Standard ads appear on this secondary page in a non intrusive way.

Posted by: Niran Amir | October 6, 2009 5:18 PM

Hi Gary,
Good questions.
Our model works as such that once an image is published we'll not take it down (assuming the publisher is complying with usage terms)so you don't need to worry about ending up with broken links on your site.

Second, you're right, we don't show ads on/below the published image, we tried that before and didn't think we're doing justice to our content partners and their valuable images nor to our publishers who didn't want ads mixing with their content, so we show related thumbnail images, when a viewer clicks a thumbnail we show more images in full size and ads appearing on top/ side of page, again in a non intrusive way.

Feel free to contact me, happy to walk you thru some examples.
Niran

Posted by: Niran Amir | October 6, 2009 5:27 PM

It's a great idea, although we found it a bit slow to load, also, many themes handle images that have been loaded up to the gallery, this will break many current themes and photos will have to be recoded.

Posted by: Steven | October 8, 2009 5:18 PM

I visited your blog for the first time and just been your fan. Keep posting as I am gonna come to read it everyday..

Posted by: Tall clothing | October 10, 2009 12:17 AM