Like Etsy, New York based Fotolia is a new, specialized p2p ecommerce site that combines an innovative business model with Ajax, tagging, rss and great design.
Fotolia launched yesterday.
Fotolia is a site where photographers can sell their images directly to consumers. They offer only royalty free images (Getty Images, for instance, offers a mix of royalty free and rights managed images). Photographers keep up to 80% of fees.
Three types of rights may be purchased - web only, print only, and exclusive buyout. The exclusive buyout option results in the image being removed from the site,and no futher sales of the image are made after that.
Fotolia has created an innovative pricing system to encourage use by photographers and manage the user experience. Photographers may price photos within certain ranges determined by their rank. The more sales a photographer has, the higher their rank. Prices start at zero and can be as high as $2,000 for an exclusive buyout.
The site is very well designed, and they’ve integrated Ajax previews of images along with photographer tagging of images for easier searching. They have multi-language support (including blogs in four languages) and RSS for all results pages.
After a 6 month limited beta, Fotolia now has 100,000 images online.
Integration of AJAX is pretty neat there. And they also offer a Affiliation scheme .
Photo site, uses tagging and ajax, rss too! Wow! I mean wow! Innovation seems to be flowing from all directions in Web2.0 world. And people can sell their photos here. Unbelievable. Never heard of this before. I swear to God.
So, how exactly is this better and more innovative than http://www.istockphoto.com?
Istockphoto is old and rusty. According to me, It is not more innovative than Istockphoto but really more web 2.0. That’s what matters !!!
the term “p2p ecommerce site” is a bit misleading. fotolia is following the micropayment business model pioneered by istockphoto, and which has quite a few other followers. While it does allow buyers to become contributors and vice-versa, it is not really peer-to-peer, as much as a platform for many many photographers to sell their images through one centralized place.
I like their Forum 2.0 http://www.fotolia.com/forum/
This is a real viable business model as I’m tired of the royalty-free images you can get from corbis, getty, etc.
I for one is definately interested in this service and will be ready to purchase if I find images that are unique and beautiful.
Thanks for letting me know about this site, Michael!
I’ve just registered ! It’s a great system they offer : easy, fast and powerfull !
I like the idea to sell my photos in many countries and the marketplace is really well done.
i love the site.
i am writting a web 2.0 blog in spanish. Your blog are helping me too much!
http://wwwhatsnew.blogspot.com/