More than 35 million Getty Images can now be used for blogs for free through a new HTML embed tool. This is also intended to generate additional revenue for the company and the photographers.
The American stock photo agency reportedly made millions of its professional quality pictures available for free to use on non-commercial articles. The photos come with buttons for Twitter and Flickr, where a link to an image can be shared.
To use the company's photos, users will have to select an image from a huge portfolio of images with embed code. After finding the perfect photo for their blog, they need to copy the embed code that is displayed in the embed window and paste it into the source code of the blog site, website, or anywhere they want to display it.
The mechanics are similar with how we do it when embedding tweets and YouTube videos.
The Seattle-based company, which originally offered their photos in exchange of licensing fees, has decided to made the photos available for free because it saw its photos displayed on different social sites and blog sites that hadn't paid for the photo. However, it strictly said that their free-of-charge photos must not be used for any promotional purposes.
But since the metadata remains with the photo, users will be directed back to Getty Images for further details about the photo, including its photographer, and possibly entice them to license the image for other purposes. In that way the company can unearth new revenue streams not just for the company, but for their artists, as well.
"What we're trying to do it take a behavior that already exists and enable it legally, then try to get some benefits back to the photographer primarily through attributed and linkage," said Craig Peters, senior vice president of Getty Images' business development, product, and content division, to CNET.
"Over time there are other monetization options we can look at," Peters added. "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."
