This is Ophir from GumGum. Thank you for the comments and interest. I’d like to speak to a few issues:

1) Re: Piracy - We do not claim, nor is it our intention, to stop content piracy on the Internet. We know, as well as anyone, that this is an impossibility. We have implemented several anti-piracy measures such as replacing a right-click ‘Save-As’ with a ‘License Me’ option, keeping content out of the cache, preventing hotlinking etc., but obviously a screen capture will work (though screen capturing and cropping is hardly easy to automate and is a headache in any case).

Our focus is as a distribution and monetization platform for *legitimate* content licensing. We believe our model simply makes the most sense for the Internet. We believe that GumGum will curb piracy by making it so easy, frictionless and affordable (ie: eliminating capital intensive barriers to entry) to license media that publishers no longer have much incentive to pirate media (ie: what iTunes did for music). In the end, piracy will continue as will legitimate licensing practices. We intend to be the platform to deliver and monetize legitimate licenses.

2) Re: Flash - Flash lends itself to a lot of flexibility. Most importantly, it gives us the ability to display interactive advertisements overlaid on top of media. This licensing option enables publishers to license content for free while compensating content-owners handsomely. Beyond this, we are able to do dynamic watermarking and seamlessly add other useful features moving forward. Lastly, the platform is in the process of being extended to video and audio (which would be in a flash embed regardless).

Sorry about the performance issues when the post first went up. That has been tended to.

I invite you to visit our blog at http://blog.gumgum.com for more information and to remain up to date.

Check out this post specifically to get a better sense of how we think about the problem and our solution: http://blog.gumgum.com/2008/02/chew-on-this.html

Thanks!

Ophir

Das Fotografie-Blog berichtet von einem “revolutionären Honorarmodell für Online-Fotos”, umgesetzt von der US-amerikanischen Agentur gumgum. Das macht neugierig.

Worin besteht nun das revolutionäre Honorarmodell? Zunächst einmal darin, dass ve…

I don’t get it how flash can prevent from stealing the image? do you think people don’t know how to make a screenshot? If someone wants to steal the image then flash won’t help. still think that without flash this service could be more successfull.

Those wanting to steal photos should realize that the photographers look at websites all the time and using gumgum, it should be obvious that the image is being used illegally. I know photographers who make more money from those that steal their work than they do from selling their images.

If I’m going to use this in my blog, I would definitely go with whoever can provide the best, broader professional content. Given the current relationships with the major players like Corbis, the picapp product is going to be really hard to beat.

http://www.stockphototalk.com/.....scout.html

I found your entry interesting do I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog :)…

GumGum Launches New Image Licensing Platform: GumGum co-founder Ari Mir introduces his new company and submitted a GumGum fact sheet…

2) would never want to rely on your servers to serve photos, unless you add significant band with you will slow down many sites — Would I have to pay for impression when you are slowing down my site.

3) CPM is way expensive for a site that uses photos in every post, way to hard to manage and leave the possibility that the content “owner” will revoke the license and I’ll have a big broken image or no image on the post. This happens multiple times and shit — what a headache

I’ll stick with the flat licensing fee that way I can host everything and not worry

Their site went live yesterday. How did your site (shutterpoint.com, a competing photo licensing platform) do in it’s first 24 hours during a TechCrunch post? Ah.. maybe you haven’t had that ‘great’ problem yet. Look, we’d all like to get a mention on here.. but it’s no reason to pretend like an objective and interested reader just so you can throw a cheap jab at a competing biz model. Hate the game not the player.

Can we have some comments about news about startups that actually make some sense?

Can we have some news about startups that actually make some sense.

i have a stock image and footage site called Cutcaster and would love to chat with you about your ideas and how we could work together.

we allow users to set their own prices or use our algorithm to find the correct market price and i believe your model is another way of calculating the correct market price. id love to see more of how it works and what type of customers you are looking for. check out http://www.cutcaster.com and shoot me an email nice work.

Looks like one hell of a product, eh?

I give them an A for the idea and an F for execution.

Michael,

The above is not true. You can easily track impressions and serve ads if you just use a link to the image that is stored on the central server. The image link would be generated through the panel and linked to the publisher ID. Server then can easily count how many impressions the image got and embed ads as well if needed.

I just can’t understand why GumGum went with Flash route when just a simple image link would be much more usable.

In the model where you pay, GumGum will have to get people to stop thinking about the cost per impression and more that GumGum provides a far superior experience than doing it the ‘other way.’ It’s doable.. iTunes demonstrated you don’t need to end piracy to succeed in convincing some people to pay for convenience. With regards to photos I think people would keep returning to a source of high quality photos even more so than music files. So technology is part of it.. and behind the scene deals with content providers is huge.

In the ad supported model it seems like a much simpler proposition. Give me access to your large database of images and I’ll gladly serve a small ad.. that is if i find the perfect photo for my post under 30 seconds.

I’m impressed with their execution so far.

Everyone give yourself a pat on the back for being so goddamn righteous. And then diss a company for trying make the market better.

I have been reading TC for over two years. Thank you Michael.

I have read through the above comments, some are painful, some are complimentary and some are not worth referencing. Regarding:

1) Performance issues: TC is powerful, we are self-funded and the end result is obvious. However, thanks to (http://engineyard.com) we successfully migrated and went live again within 2 hours!
2) Piracy: Take a screenshot and crack our code. DRM for B2C is fools gold. We are a B2B platform. Businesses have advertising dollars at stake and cannot afford to conduct in illegal activities.
4) Flash: The end user will never know the difference. In the near future, Flash will work on all mobile devices. Without Flash you will never consume a YouTube video, Kongregate game or Scribd PDF on your mobile phone.
3) Pricing: Flickr has free photos and we love them. Stock sites sell photos for $1 and we hope to partner with them. GumGum doesn’t set prices, content owners set prices.

Final note: We don’t serve a LOT of use cases. We have no interest in the offline world. We have identified one problem we believe is and will continue to become a very big problem. The problem applies to photography, music, video, live casting, games, and any other saleable content. It will be a long and ugly road, but one worth paving.

-Ari (CPO, gumgum.com)

Here’s a live demo of PicApp with picture from Getty.

I would think this is actually very different. You are comparing it to music that people download for personal use. It’s a whole different ballgame when you are using the material for financial gain. If you did take a song or a video that was copyrighted and slapped it onto your revenue-generating blog you would get a take-down request followed by suit and that will likely never change.

@25 and then #7

I don’t think preventing a user from lifting an image should be the point. As many have pointed out above, it’s as easy as screen capture. However, you miss Mike’s point. If you use a copyrighted photo without licensing, you set yourself up to get sued. For example, the New York Times can’t just go printing pictures they find on Flickr. They have to get rights to an image before using it. This is what any established company or blog would do, if for nothing else just not to be sued. With that said, in response to comment #7, I think the service shouldn’t worry about preventing people from lifting images. They should just make it as dead simple as possible for the user. You are never going to prevent people from being able to take a photo, so why not make it easier for the people who are trying to pay for it?

I agree it’s too expensive at 0.20 CPM. There are stock agencies with celebrity photos or whatever you want that seem to be a better deal if you have any kind of traffic at all on your site.

And flash… ick. It doesn’t stop people from copying the image so why bother?

Tracking impressions - fine, I can see how this might be useful. But as a licensing tool it is virtually useless. It solves a problem that does not exist. Whoever is going to license through GumGum, would’ve licensed from any standard stock photo site _and_ get the actual image and not the flash.

OMG, I just hack-ed something….

-Matt

Will a publisher want to bother with flash and some convoluted $0.20 cpm licensing, if all the headaches can be avoided by just paying 99 cents instead? Perhaps if the site is looking for uneducated clients, then there is a tiny chance.

By the way, their search is down right now.