Image details: Vegas or Bust served by picapp.com
The new PicApp online service makes it possible for bloggers to use high quality photos from Getty Images and Corbis, among others, for free. The only thing is that the images don’t look quite as nice because they are embedded flash images.
Additionally, I’ve been poking around trying to find how and if photographers are compensated for the use of these images. No luck. It appears that PicApp is getting revenue from advertisements that are embedded with the photo, of which I’m sure Getty and Corbis take a cut. Again, I’ve not seen how much of that cut gets passed on to the photographer. I can’t imagine that the pennies from these ads are will compare to the per image price that the photographer would normally get for the use of his or her photos. For the forseeable future, the example image above will be the only PicApp image that appears on this site, even if b5media is putting it on all their sites.
So, photographers, what do you think about PicApp? Are there any Getty or Corbis shooters out there who can shed light on the compensation for photographers as a result of this deal?
The only photos that we show on PicApp from our various providers are the ones that are wholly owned, so we don’t get in any conflicts with various photographers.
At first, due to a mistake, we showed images that weren’t wholly owned, and photographers weren’t happy as they weren’t getting a cut of the advertising revenue.
We would like to become a distribution model for photographers with large libraries to monetize their works, but currently we are focusing on building an easy to use, modern, accessible and interesting platform for bloggers to use.
If you have any questions, concerns, or comments please feel free to contact me.