b5media, a media network with over 350 blogs, has partnered with PicScout to obtain legally licensed images at no cost through their PicApp application.
PicScout originally started off as a content copyright enforcer, hunting down unlicensed images on the web with its flagship ImageTracker program. After realizing how ubiquitous unlicensed images were, the company launched PicApp, a flash-based image provider that offers legally licensed images from large databases for free. The company makes money by including ads as part of the embedded picture viewer.
b5media will use PicApp to complement a number of other image partners. Many high quality images from licensed catalogs can go for $10 and up, which can have a significant impact on a blogging network’s bottom line. The company says that using PicApp’s free content for some of these images should reduce licensing fees substantially. b5 has over 250 bloggers, which generate upwards of 10 million unique visitors monthly.
The partnership marks a big win for PicApp, but it’s hard to imagine a Flash-based image provider becoming commonplace on the web. Flash is clunky and slow compared to normal images, but at this point the plugin is a necessity for image catalogs to control their content. GumGum is another player in this space that uses similar Flash technology.
Here’s an example of a licensed image:
Image details: Cannes: Blindness - Premiere served by picapp.com
What great quality pixelated example you came up with.. Having the image in flash immediately means I won’t use this at all.
typo in the headline
and maybe that video is buggy, loading stalled at that point, on comments and main page … or server?
They got themselves a really cute logo. It just makes me want to hug their whole company.
I hope they have enough to feed the models
@4 - agree!
why can i see pixels!?!?!
I noticed the image right away too. As b5’s Training Manager, I’ve been working with our bloggers (there are over 250 on 350+ blogs, btw) on using PicApp. They have come a long way with the service.
So it looks like when you embedded the code into your post your changed the size of the flash widget.
Tris @ML2 and M101
Just wanted to make everyone aware that the editorial imagery marketplace is at most a $300 million a year market dominated by Getty Images, AP, Reuters, and Corbis licensing content for a fee. A few of these companies have a hand in pic app (Getty and Corbis). Picapp is simply their defense to blogger theft of content but NOT big business by all means. Although this is a nice resource for bloggers, the space (editorial imagery - as blogging is for “newsworthy content”) that this company operates in is not large enough to make it a business with substantial size. The commercial photo marketplace is much larger but dominated by growing micro stock sites and free photo sharing sites, which also include the all necessary rights and clearances for bloggers to posting free images, free of ads or purchase quality images for $1 each (micro stock). Placing ads on images is like spamming the internet.
Tris Hussey is right, as PicApp head of product, I noticed this also and confirmed that the original embed script on Techcrunch site had been modified. You can look at the original image as it should be by clicking on the “Copyright, image details” button on the top viral menu. Also try it your self and experience the hi-quality images we offer.
Thats all nice but the picture you embed looks like resized 1000 times or saved with “paint” lol. Hope not all pictures are like that.
The ads are way to big for what you get, so I’d say the tradeoff istn’t right. Especially if you can get quality photos from Flickr with a CC licence. The notion is right anyway - just the execution could be far better.
The image the PicApp people provided of Mike worked last night, but then when I went to post it gave me an error, so I had to generate a new embed code (which apparently had a resized and pixelated image).
I grabbed one of Natalie Portman instead
I can’t imagine anybody actually using this service as its in Flash
Hey everyone ,PicScout CEO here , Thank you for the comments and suggestions !
as the b5 guys said – we did come a long way , working together with the bloggers , to improve the way bloggers can legally consume high-end “editorial” (the ones you cannot find on flicker and CC) and “creative” images.
So far , we found the FLASH solution as the better one , in terms of providing the content owners with the comfort\protection level needed.
These images (unlike the $1 images someone mentioned earlier) actually cost a LOT of money – so the value for the blogger\publisher is high.
Other important values are the comfort and state of mind of using legal content and the fact that as the new media journalists you can enjoy the same time sensitive image feeds as the old media guys do.
Have a great weekend!
** Eyal **
Btw - We know that Flash is not perfect –> Any chance to challenge the many smart people reading this post to come up with an image solution that is easier than flash but still keeps the images under control ? we promise to listen!
Jason –
thank you for replacing the ‘me&Arrington’ picapp image with a ‘Natalie Portman’ picapp image !
–> looks much better !! (no offense mike
So this is what the b5 owner has been upto
havent gotten replies on emails iv been sending him
You haven’t? I’m only 4 days behind on email…
http://www.picapp.com/FTP/edit.....34fa88.JPG
Doesn’t seem too hard to find the images
Sorry for double post, but GumGum isn’t invulnerable either:
http://gumgum.com/photos/79511.....fter-lunch
http://s3.amazonaws.com/gumgum.....2FBehRE%3D
I do like the idea of being able to license images properly, but flash isn’t the answer (and I don’t really know one either to be honest)
Booyeah! Triple post
The s3 link ‘expired’ apparently, but it’s still findable when it loads. You’d have to do it each time though.
For anyone horribly concerned with stealing images though, it wouldn’t be hard to whip up a greasemonkey script or addon to circumvent it and just display the original image
As a photographer, I would like to point out the photographers at the big agencies don’t receive royalties on “new media” sales at all only ala cart sales to mags and websites….Not a penny to the photographers ….total scam….Picapp keeps a cut and the photo agency keeps a cut….nothing to the photographers. The model seems nice at face value as it makes advertisers get exposure and helps further turn blogs into SPAM BALLS by placing ads all over them like a MySpace pages; however, this does nothing for the artists who work so hard to create the content. This is not a content licensing model with any long term potential or real money running through it, it’s just a scam by the large agencies to enter the advertising space and they are way late to the party.
Hey GumGum needs a lot of work in my view. They don’t even have a secure way to deposit funds. That should’ve been resolved before they even went live. The site has potential…but as of now, i feel it’s a little premature.
This is hilarious. All of these things are foiled by a simple Print Screen (PrtSc), and then pasting in to photoshop/gimp/psp/mspaint.
Considering the unethical manner in which picscout crawls websites, ignoring robots.text and other access measures wherever it can, none of their services should be sued by any self respecting site owner, nor the companies they are employed by. This is to by no means advocate image theft, but two wrongs don;t make a right.