Remember back in 2014 when Mark Zuckerberg promised that WhatsApp will function as a standalone app, completely sandboxed from the rest of the Facebook ecosystem?
> After interacting with the team at Getty Images more and better understanding their long-term vision, we realized we shared so much alignment that going at this together could be much more impactful than going at it separately.
Of course they will say that now, but isn't Unsplash a direct threat to Getty's bottom line?
Unsplash images are free for commercial and non-commercial purposes with no permission needed. The only limitation is that you can't sell them or start a competing service.
in general i would agree, but i think that github might be one exception, the free plan was expanded to include private repo's, the redesign is annoying but usable
they have made some mistakes with things like the dmca notice on youtube-dl but thankfully restored it and seem to be willing to help fight for it
(Almost every website that features free images already also shows ads from websites like Getty Images and iStockphoto.)
I can also see it happen that Unsplash remains free forever, but that it will be used to lead more people to Getty Images. And that's very understandable from a Getty Images point of view, right?
My guess would be that unsplash will start adding source file size limits (that can unlocked with a Getty account) and long term quality and quantity will stagnate as its used as an acquisition funnel for their paid services
I'd guess it will be a gradual process that starts with a constant nag that you can find more and better images if only you hand over your card details.
Unsplash images are free for commercial and non-commercial purposes with no permission needed. The only limitation is that you can't sell them or start a competing service.
My theory is Getty is really paying for the right to sell them. Getty has a lot of very large customers who pay for access to their libraries and adding a new substantial library to their plans could benefit them.
I'm thinking it's a bit like when AWS takes something like MongoDB and rolls out DocumentDB.. there are companies who are so entrenched with their AWS accounts that it seems more appealing than dealing with the hassle of opening a separate account and doing all 'the legal' for another service, even if it's free/cheaper. If a large agency or institution has a process around Getty and the way they assign rights and manage licenses, maybe they'll happily pay for the Unsplash library from Getty even if they could get it free separately(?)
Very slick, and fast. But how do they pay for the site? There are no ads and no monetization I could find. The claim 4 billion image views a month, that has to cost them some bandwidth...
Pexels has affiliate ads (to paid stock sites) in specific locations; as an example, when your search returns zero Pexels results.
Pexels content is also syndicated to Canva, where it is free to use (under the same license) by several hundred million users. This helps us provide a better Canva user experience, while giving more exposure to work on Pexels.
I was a contributor [0] to their second batch of photos (the first with user-generated content) when they initially launched under the name Ooomf because I love the philosophy of open-source. They even published an open-source photography book [1], which I was featured in [2]. It is very cool to stumble across my images across the web.
The initial model was to receive a handful of user-generated photos, then handpick 10 each week and feature them [3]. I don't even see this feature page anymore.
However, we all know that once you sell, you lose control of the product. While on day one the service will still exist, I doubt it will be around with its current philosophy for much longer, especially since Getty has already stolen all my images from 500px that do not have people (so they can sell them without releases).
That is the license for downloading but does not specify what happens on uploading -- it appears photos uploaded to unsplash were given to unsplash, relinquishing all rights.
Unsplash has a great product, however for Getty this seems to be a good deal more because they eliminate a competitor than because they acquire a good product/team.
I read that Unsplash's plan to monetize was to sell banner ads and branded image placement, but that's gotta make less money than Getty slapping their normal business model onto Unsplash, right?
RIP. I'm sure this acquisition will be great for the team but it's pretty obvious Getty will fill the site with tricky sponsored images. They will also likely start fading out new free images until the site is mostly stale or filled with sponsored image links. I could also see them playing around with image licensing so it's less obvious how you can use them. Welp, I guess there's always Pexels.
Fortunately there are a lot of people who travel, and modern phones take remarkably good photos easily. The biggest immediate impact the "photographer" has is on framing the shot; but with high res images and you being willing to crop, you can do half of that job yourself.
So there should be another to replace Unsplash. And if the founders can guess on being acquired in a few years, then this isn't a bad plan.
Getty already offers free images through embeddable content as well as brand partnerships, so it's natural for them to want a fresh injection of great work. Especially since their library has been rather stale for so long. It's hard to keep nice pictures coming in when photographers are getting royalty statements of only pennies. Of course, that's still more than Unsplash photographers receive. It will be interesting to see how Getty leverages this new model of 'images as ad network.'
The Unsplash dashboard features the number of image views/downloads very prominently and artists treat it as a kind of cachet. An image with 100,000 views at $2.00 CPM is what, $200? It's strange to me that photographers brag about their view counts when it's plain evidence of how much the company is making off their shadow labor. Credit to the Unsplash team for taking this dissonance to its apex - it really did require a new way of viewing images as assets that hadn't exist before. I'm hopeful that they can bring that kind of thinking to Getty. I'm not that hopeful that any photographer benefits from this new partnership.
I am unclear why Getty Images would be interested, unless the purchase price was less than the cost of internally building its own loss leader open source image site that allows them to try to upsell to “premium” photos.
Users have limited loyalty to any particular source of “free”. Getty presumably has a far larger library from which to pull images, so there can’t be any advantage to Unsplash’s library.
It seems that one of Getty's biggest problems is that the variety of fresh imagery their customers expect Getty to have to hand has shot up while revenues have grown more modestly. Maybe Unsplash's library and base of contributors will actually provide some value in the long tail for their existing customers.. and it might be possible for them to offer that extended library to customers with existing packages without them really caring where it came from or that they could get it cheaper elsewhere.
I could imagine tightening collaboration with Getty which could make sense, but once you let somebody acquire you, the game is over. No promise can hold.
Can someone link me a list acquisition promises that new owners of various businesses broke in the past? There must be one.
You won't have to leave them, as within a year there will be nothing recognizable to leave. It will have been replaced with free content wrapped in a bow and pricetag, or simply the best free content redirecting to similar paid content.
If you still want to upload your awesome shots to a community that might use them for their projects, I highly recommend Creative Market (https://creativemarket.com/kirill).
Started uploading photos there a few years ago, and I still get a payment every few months.
You don’t have to charge a lot for your photos, but this way it’s something to keep you/site going, while also sharing what you have with the world.
I have been browsing Unsplash for five or six years now. I remember the time when it did not have ads to the how it is now. I understand the owner might not have been earning a lot from the site, so I get that he wanted to cash out. I just hope that the content remains of high quality and open source if possible.
Whether they can or not is less relevant. Getty has already demonstrated that it is willing to sell free works to people who don't realize they can get it for free (legally). I'm not even talking about where they take other people's works and illegally resell it as their own...
Getty, if judged by their past behaviors, is an evil company.
For such customers the mere fact it is free would make the licensing questionable.
Consider a service like unsplash: what vetting can there be that the people who upload actually hold the copyright? Do unsplash indemnify you if it turns out they never had permission? How does it look in a court, should it come to that?
It’s not about paying money for the image as much as it’s about buying an assurance – even if it is only to be able to say "we acted in good faith and licensed this from a ‘reputable’ supplier.” Some legal teams are incredibly risk averse.
Unsplash almost certainly isn’t considered by these sorts of customers. It’s not some kind of snobbery, it’s to avoid having to deal with the case where the one image that you build a multi-million dollar ad campaign on turns out not to have been improperly licensed.
Has anyone made a complete archive of Unsplash, so that at least when Getty shut it down ("in order to serve customers metter by focusing on our core business") the images that have already been uploaded there will remain available?
Also, it might be hard to find a scraper, since Unsplash likes (or at least liked) sending "friendly" requests to authors of scrapers on GitHub to remove their repos.
Excellent idea. I'd be curious to see what the current compressed database size is... Their (wonderful and brief) license does prohibits "the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service", so this would have to be a personal archive.
I remember reading that at the beginning,there was a requirement for a person to walk ahead of an automobile and alert others that it's coming. It was related to horse industry lobbying too.
The 1865 "Red Flag Act" "required all road locomotives, which included automobiles, to travel at a maximum of 4 mph (6.4 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3.2 km/h) in the city, as well as requiring a man carrying a red flag to walk in front of road vehicles hauling multiple wagons.
The 1896 Act removed some restrictions of the 1865 act and raised the speed to 14 mph (23 km/h). "
There were similar debates in the 90's when the first modern electric cars came out, regarding the fact that they were very silent compared to other cars and could cause pedestrians to cross the road without realizing a car was coming. Some suggested to add an artificial noise for added safety.
Tbh I had at least a few situation where I was nearly hit by an electric car because I assumed there were no traffic around. admittedly, I was jaywalking too.
I have to say this kind of announcement sticks in the craw. I get that Mikael Cho and colleagues created Unsplash and it's theirs to do with as they please: they don't owe us anything. But really, couldn't they just come right out and say "They offered us too much money, we couldn't resist, So long, suckers"?
if you sell your company to a Getty or Facebook or Zoom, for example, you really were just selling your customers and eliminating yourself as competition, for probably a nice payoff. if you had a bad VC deal, then you the founders/builders might even get nothing.
I remember the day Crew.co (another Mikael Cho venture) was sold to Dribbble. I was a member of, and I've felt cheated. I was sold and paid nothing. I've contributed to the value of Crew.co and I was ousted from a day to another.
The official reason selling Crew was to focus on Unsplash. Another venture where network effects (free work done by contributors) can generate later a fortune for few.
So ... we've been tricked. Our collective efforts was monetized by a few. That's network economy.
281 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadRemember back in 2014 when Mark Zuckerberg promised that WhatsApp will function as a standalone app, completely sandboxed from the rest of the Facebook ecosystem?
That didn't happen, did it?
Of course they will say that now, but isn't Unsplash a direct threat to Getty's bottom line?
Unsplash images are free for commercial and non-commercial purposes with no permission needed. The only limitation is that you can't sell them or start a competing service.
How long before this changes?
they have made some mistakes with things like the dmca notice on youtube-dl but thankfully restored it and seem to be willing to help fight for it
I can also see it happen that Unsplash remains free forever, but that it will be used to lead more people to Getty Images. And that's very understandable from a Getty Images point of view, right?
I'd guess it will be a gradual process that starts with a constant nag that you can find more and better images if only you hand over your card details.
Ultimately, it will be just another Getty brand.
My theory is Getty is really paying for the right to sell them. Getty has a lot of very large customers who pay for access to their libraries and adding a new substantial library to their plans could benefit them.
I'm thinking it's a bit like when AWS takes something like MongoDB and rolls out DocumentDB.. there are companies who are so entrenched with their AWS accounts that it seems more appealing than dealing with the hassle of opening a separate account and doing all 'the legal' for another service, even if it's free/cheaper. If a large agency or institution has a process around Getty and the way they assign rights and manage licenses, maybe they'll happily pay for the Unsplash library from Getty even if they could get it free separately(?)
https://www.pexels.com
Pexels has affiliate ads (to paid stock sites) in specific locations; as an example, when your search returns zero Pexels results.
Pexels content is also syndicated to Canva, where it is free to use (under the same license) by several hundred million users. This helps us provide a better Canva user experience, while giving more exposure to work on Pexels.
The initial model was to receive a handful of user-generated photos, then handpick 10 each week and feature them [3]. I don't even see this feature page anymore.
However, we all know that once you sell, you lose control of the product. While on day one the service will still exist, I doubt it will be around with its current philosophy for much longer, especially since Getty has already stolen all my images from 500px that do not have people (so they can sell them without releases).
[0]: https://unsplash.com/@css
[1]: https://book.unsplash.com/
[2]: https://unsplash.com/photos/bSmKli4OTIY
[3]: https://unsplash.com/collections/5/collection-%235%3A-crew
The commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) would have retained ownership.
This is incorrect, according to section 6 of https://unsplash.com/terms
I read that Unsplash's plan to monetize was to sell banner ads and branded image placement, but that's gotta make less money than Getty slapping their normal business model onto Unsplash, right?
> will continue to operate as a stand-alone business
Sounds funny after you read the exact same words for the 17th time!
That is literally Unsplash's current business model already
https://unsplash.com/brands
I hope this means that their current free offerings will continue.
https://www.pexels.com/ also offers similar free collections.
So there should be another to replace Unsplash. And if the founders can guess on being acquired in a few years, then this isn't a bad plan.
The Unsplash dashboard features the number of image views/downloads very prominently and artists treat it as a kind of cachet. An image with 100,000 views at $2.00 CPM is what, $200? It's strange to me that photographers brag about their view counts when it's plain evidence of how much the company is making off their shadow labor. Credit to the Unsplash team for taking this dissonance to its apex - it really did require a new way of viewing images as assets that hadn't exist before. I'm hopeful that they can bring that kind of thinking to Getty. I'm not that hopeful that any photographer benefits from this new partnership.
Users have limited loyalty to any particular source of “free”. Getty presumably has a far larger library from which to pull images, so there can’t be any advantage to Unsplash’s library.
I am guessing it was a very low purchase price.
It seems that one of Getty's biggest problems is that the variety of fresh imagery their customers expect Getty to have to hand has shot up while revenues have grown more modestly. Maybe Unsplash's library and base of contributors will actually provide some value in the long tail for their existing customers.. and it might be possible for them to offer that extended library to customers with existing packages without them really caring where it came from or that they could get it cheaper elsewhere.
Can someone link me a list acquisition promises that new owners of various businesses broke in the past? There must be one.
1. Promise to not hoard and sell user data: https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads
2. Get acquired by arguably the largest ad network and data hoarding giant
3. Proceed to flow user data to FB, forcing it down the throat of all their users
Started uploading photos there a few years ago, and I still get a payment every few months.
You don’t have to charge a lot for your photos, but this way it’s something to keep you/site going, while also sharing what you have with the world.
Getty, if judged by their past behaviors, is an evil company.
It seems plausible to me that there are some customers whose legal teams would be very uneasy about anything free.
For those customers, Getty’s name and “reputability” may be the service they are paying for.
For such customers the mere fact it is free would make the licensing questionable.
Consider a service like unsplash: what vetting can there be that the people who upload actually hold the copyright? Do unsplash indemnify you if it turns out they never had permission? How does it look in a court, should it come to that?
It’s not about paying money for the image as much as it’s about buying an assurance – even if it is only to be able to say "we acted in good faith and licensed this from a ‘reputable’ supplier.” Some legal teams are incredibly risk averse.
Unsplash almost certainly isn’t considered by these sorts of customers. It’s not some kind of snobbery, it’s to avoid having to deal with the case where the one image that you build a multi-million dollar ad campaign on turns out not to have been improperly licensed.
Also, it might be hard to find a scraper, since Unsplash likes (or at least liked) sending "friendly" requests to authors of scrapers on GitHub to remove their repos.
However, deleting your photos does not prevent other people from using them in the future.
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/11/05/the-origin...
Yes. In the UK this requirement lasted until 1896 when it was removed by an act of Parliament [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotives_on_Highways_Act_18...
The 1896 Act removed some restrictions of the 1865 act and raised the speed to 14 mph (23 km/h). "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts
if you sell your company to a Getty or Facebook or Zoom, for example, you really were just selling your customers and eliminating yourself as competition, for probably a nice payoff. if you had a bad VC deal, then you the founders/builders might even get nothing.
The official reason selling Crew was to focus on Unsplash. Another venture where network effects (free work done by contributors) can generate later a fortune for few.
So ... we've been tricked. Our collective efforts was monetized by a few. That's network economy.