Ask HN: How to monetize 10 million photos

#1 is dependent upon the quality of the photos. #2 is dependent upon your ability to drive traffic to the photos (which may be proportional to the quality of the photos.)

This is totally not my field, but I suspect there may be a very good reason why you are able to buy 10 million assorted amateur photos very cheaply, and that's assuming that the rights are all in order (i.e., each of the photographers have signed documents transferring the rights to the photos to you.)

I would guess your chances of doing #2 are not much higher after buying the photos than they are right now, unless the photos provide something in particular that's interesting that you can exploit. There are a large number of freely-licensed photographs on the web that you can use free right now: everything from NASA photos to things people on flickr tag as cc-by or cc-by-sa, to a ton of stuff contributed to Wikimedia Commons. You could take those, stick them on a website somewhere, and slap ads on them (and people do that). What will 10 million new photographs add? Unique content that isn't already republished elsewhere, of course, but how valuable is that to the image-farm-with-ads endeavor? Will users even know that your images are unique rather than copied from Wikipedia/Flickr/wherever? My guess is that most won't, at least if you display them as a jumbled aggregate set of images: a random unsorted 1 million images from one place versus a random unsorted 1 million images from another place.

It's possible there's interesting subsets buried in there that do 1) provide unique content not already available on the internet, and 2) that you would be able to drive traffic to. I suspect it would be a lot of labor to sort and figure out if that's true, though.

Do you have metadata on each photo? If so, how much?

Thank yor for your comments, The photos has an arrange quality, like most photos on Flickr, but they are unique, most of them are not published elsewhere.

The don't have meta data, but most of them has a short description. I have some data, like gender and location, about the photographers

Give away 10 or so images for signing up and then charge a quarter for each down load, giving the user a license to use the image on a website or print run of 100,000 or less. Then encourage users to upload their images and share the revenue with them, 20% would be good. As you get more users you could add different sizes for different prices, $1 for a web image and up to $50 for a bill board size. It worked for istockphoto.com. If this images cover the gamut of genres, I would contact anyone that has anything to do with design, architects, we developers, interior designers.

1. Put them on a site, 2. Sort by metadata 3. Let users vote on what they like (think "hot or not") 4. When user hits a threshold of X votes, give them a free photo. 5. Sell/rent preference data > pros who use photos: designers, architects etc >to camera companies to use in R&D and improving digital cameras >to education outfits that train photographers > pros who use color: fashion designers, paint manufacturers