I’m really excited today to announce that I have joined the advisory board of Photrade (picture is by Renee Blodgett and is Andrew Paradies, CEO of Photrade). You can read the press release here – but in short, Photrade is a company that excites me on numerous fronts and crosses two of my passions – photography and blogging.
Let me break it down into those two areas:
Photrade for Photographers
Store, Share, Protect and Make Money From Their Photos
Photrade offers photographers of all levels a number of services. At it’s heart is the ability to upload images to online photo albums where you can store and share your shots with the world – however added to this online albumn space is the option to sell copies of your images and to license them to other websites.
In short the vision is to provide a space for both pro and amateur photographers to Store, Share, Protect and Make Money From Their Photos.
I won’t go through the full feature list here and now (I’m obviously a bit biased and have therefore asked one of my DPS moderators to write up a review for DPS) but I’m excited by what I see Photrade developing for photographers. In the mean time you can check out a first impression review of Photrade at Read Write Web and see what TechCrunch had to say about it here.
Photrade for Publishers
Free Copyright Protected Images for Your Blog
Most bloggers and web publishers know the power of a good image to lift our articles and posts. They can set content apart from the rest – but issues of copyright can be something of a minefield to navigate. I know at b5media we’ve really gone through many options for working out how to license photos legally and it can become very time consuming and expensive to get the images we need.
Photrade has a system that awards photographers yet also protects publishers while giving them the photos that they need – for free. Here’s how it works (from their FAQ):
“Photrade’s adcosystem allows photographers to get paid for every view of their photos while providing free content to online publications. A photographer posts a beautiful photo of New York on Photrade.com to share within the adcosystem. A blogger, who is writing about New York searches for photos of New York and finds the perfect photo to fit the post.
The blogger grabs the sharing code from Photrade and posts the photo in their blog. When the blogger grabbed the code photrade put a small advertisement at the bottom of the photo, and also added text attributing the photo to the photographer (note: any/all watermarking remains on the photo).
Every time the photo is viewed the photographer earns a portion of the ad revenue generated by that image. So, the photographer gets attribution and payment for the use of their photo, advertisers get contextual in-content ads and publications get beautiful free images.”
Here is a little diagram of how it works.
Photrade is in beta so what you see over there isn’t the end product – however even in the few short months that I’ve been tracking with them I’ve seen some amazing advances in their technology and am so excited by what I see coming next.
Further Reading on Photrade
Check out what other bloggers and media sources are saying about Photrade:
Lastly – let me share a video from Photrade who explains a little more of what it is and how it can be useful to both publishers and photographers.
Site Tour from photrade on Vimeo.
I hope this serves both as a disclosure of my involvement with Phototrade but also a helpful introduction to the company and services that they offer.
Congrats Darren!
I’ve heard some good things about Photrade, but I haven’t spent the time to dive into it yet.
Cool Darren! Looks like your photography passions, business strength from b5media came together and paid off!
I like the concept as well – everyone wins =)
This is awesome. I know you’ll be a great help in keeping Photrade relevant and viable. Congratulations!
This is very exciting stuff. Not only for you, but for all bloggers. Finding the right photo for you post is so important, but I often times feel limited by my options. This sounds like a great new addition to these options.
I’m looking forward to trying it out. My only concern will be the adds. I wonder how obtrusive they’ll be? I’ll just have to wait and see.
Photrade seems to be a very promising way for photographers to get paid for their photos, and for those photos to be available to bloggers!
I’ve forwarded this post to a couple of photographer friends, and hope they are as excited by its promise as I am.
Congratulations, Darren!
this seems like a combination of a photo stock site with an advertising network but instead of getting paid publishers receive free photos. It will be interesting to see if that will be enough.
Damn! This is a hell of a lot better post about photrade than I gave. Great work!
It’s definitely a good idea, not sure how many people want to pay to use images you can find all over the internet for free but it’s a good concept.
Congratulations! I don’t know much about photography or Photrade, but I can see this is something you’re quite passionate about. Those are the best kinds of relationships to form business wise. Good luck to you in this new endeavor and to Photrade, as well!
Sounds like Photrade needs some work. Comments on CNet and Mashable by people who’ve used were not positive.
This looks absolutely amazing. I’m not sure why no one else has ever thought of this idea but I’m glad that at least someone is going to create it. I think all bloggers will love to have the chance to not have to worry about copyright laws. I’m just wondering how many of the photos will have a watermark on them? I know above that you said that if they have a watermark on them then it will be shown when we show it on our blogs.
“Every time the photo is viewed the photographer earns a portion of the ad revenue generated by that image.”
1. Take a picture
2. Have your friend submit picture
3. Post picture on your blog
4. Submit to social bookmarking sites
5. Make money
I am wondering if anybody else has though of this yet? Or does PhoTrade have a system in place to detect something like this if it could even be detected?
While they have a great thing going for them, (watched the Shoemoney video as well), it seems like this would be exploited. Or maybe you didn’t give enough information and something is missing?
Photrade looks awesome, Shoemoney has a nice video explaining it too. Can’t wait to try it out myself. Especially the competition side!
Congratulations on your new position Darren. Good luck!
Regarding the negative comments on CNET and Mashable – they had some validity in the early days but to Photrades credit they’ve been quickly improving the bugs and problems that we early adopters faced and are quickly becoming a really viable alternative to other options like Flickr who have been very very very slow to change and grow since Yahoo bought them.
The rate of development that I’ve seen coming out of Photrade is fantastic, I think they’re going places and it’s a smart move for them to bring you on board (and smart of you to partner with them too Darren).
Congratulations…sounds like a pretty cool service.
Just signed up. Great idea, I love it. I will start looking for my pictures from here first.
~ jim
This is great news for everyone I think. You couldn’t find a better mix of expertise in a person for the adcosystem than Darren. Problogger and expert photographer? What else is there that you’d need for this mix. Congrats to Photrade. Was totally excited about what they were able to share with me at Blog World Expo ’08. Nice to know they’re just down the street in Cincy too. Maybe if they bring you in I’ll have to drive over and take you out to dinner.
I think if Darren recommend it will be a success..
I will try it…
Yeah I really like the concept – I’m always worried if a photographer will like my use of their flickr or whatever photo – great to hear about a compensation program where everyone wins
Oh, like I really need to add another hobby! This is such a wonderfully awesome idea for us amateurs. I tried to do stock photography, but breaking in was very time consuming. The adcosystem seems very smart. And the video says you can use your own photos in your own blogs or sites. And why not? The company wants traffic, so why would they care where it comes from? Now I have to reconcile this with starting my blog! If only I could quit my day job!
Great News Darren, you will be a great asset for Andy and Krista.
I have been a member there since BWE last years and it is easy to use and get’s better with each update.
I’ve been a member of Photrade for awhile now and I reckon it beats flickr hands down.
Wow….really some great photos…
“Free” photos with ads on them? No thanks, I’ll stick with my existing fair use rights under U.S. copyright law.
It’s cool! In fact it’s a good news for all avid photographers!
Congrats. :)
Congratulation! I think you will really be able to add value and make the sharing features very powerful for the publishers. That in turn will help the photographers.
I’ve been quite happy with the progress Photrade is making. Here is my portfolio and anyone can message me with requests for photos they would like to see me make for them to use:
http://www.photrade.com/dcpatton
This looks great. I am unclear as to how you make money on the ads though. Is it on a pay per click basis, or is it based solely on the revenue generated from your photo?
@ Manzanillo, that is outlined in their faq: http://info.photrade.com/content/faq?l=1#earning
“You earn ad revenue from each view of your photos on photrade or anywhere else online. You are paid ad revenue for each view of your photos on photrade; we share all of the ad revenue that we generate from our banner ads with the users who drive the traffic.”
Which is fairly new, they really didn’t have this system in place until ~ 3-5 months ago maybe?
Congradulations, I’m a new reader and I’m finding value whenever I visit. Also new to blogging I will try photrade thanks
Darren, fantastic news for Problogger and Photrade. Watch out: don’t believe everything Andrew tells you about Cincinnati, Ohio… ;-)
Darren,
Any chance you can persuade them to remove (or make it optional) the “Sell photos on photrade” link that is on the Share? The attribution already has a link back to Photrade and is less intrusive on a blog post. I suspect there are better ways to attract photographers to contribute content.
The photrade site seems broken — did they fail to thrive?
Glenn….it was a FAIL!
Sadly they ran out of $$.The site is still up but only a shell of what it once was or still could be if they ever find backers.
However, with the economy the way it is, no telling if that will happen any time soon. I’m still amazed/encouraged that the site is still there to be honest…I think it was back in Oct. when things started to crumble for them!
Hello from Montreal, Congrats
At Adeo we uses Shutter Stock, anyone have a better place to get stock photos ?
Allen