Bloggers who believe in the classic love song that goes "if a picture paints a thousand words" but do not have the money to pay for the images to use in their works, no have a good reason to celebrate and can give Getty Images a big kiss.
Getty Images has released a tool that will allow users to utilize roughly 35 million of images from its extensive portfolio for non-commercial use. It rolled out an embed tool that gives users an HTML code that can be used to post photos on different corners of the Web the same way images are grabbed from sites such as Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube.
"Getty Images is leading the way in creating a more visual world. Our new embed feature makes it easy, legal, and free for anybody to share our images on websites, blogs, and social media platforms," Getty stated on its website.
Those who want to grab images can easily do so by picking an image from a gallery, copying the embed code from the embed window of the image, and pasting the HTML code of the image on the target website.
"What we're trying to do is take a behavior that already exists and enable it legally, then try to get some benefits back to the photographer primarily through attribution and linkage," said Getty Images senior vice president of business development Craig Peters.
The latest decision of Getty Images is a complete u-turn from how it did business so far. Ever since the company started doing business, it has relied on fees paid by people who want to license its images for whatever purpose, and the company has sued those who used its images without paying. Now Getty Images has traded that screaming watermark for a credit that links back to its website.
Why did the company do it? Because of piracy, of course.
People have been stealing images from the site and instead of continuing a hopeless battle against the horde of people not respecting copyright, it will make use of the situation to expand its business opportunities.
With millions of images spreading across the Internet, Getty Images will be able to produce data that it can tap to explore more revenue streams. Posting advertisements in its images will be a possible option just like how YouTube does it.
"Over time there are other monetization options we can look at. That could be data options, advertising options. If you look at what YouTube has done with their embed capabilities, they are serving ads in conjunction with those videos that are served around the Internet," Peters added.
While it seems that Getty Images have made the decision in a snap, the company had actually been contemplating about it for sometime. After it purchased PicScout for $20 million in 2011, it has been using its technology to monitor how its images are used by Internet users.
