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‘Adsense’ style pricing license for images…….can this work?


Creative Commons License photo credit: wilhei55

A very interesting new stock image licensing model has been announced. Its in its infancy and looks like the edges are still a bit rough but the concept has great promise.

It may change the way photographers sell images for web use forever..

One of the problems with the wondrous world wide web is one click and your valuable content is copied, metadata and IPTC is stripped and your images can (and do) end up all over the web, often without permission and almost certainly without payment and its not easy or cost effective to track down.

Well……

A new company called Gum Gum are proposing a new technology that will mean anyone buying the use of your image for web purposes will never get your original file, and never get away with using the image on other sites or without renewing their licence.

How?

Read on………

In a sort of rights-managed-pay-per-click-bastard-son-of-google-adsense-type-way you get paid on the number of page impressions your image makes on the buyers website. Your stock image is only served to the end client. It never leaves the host server so the original file never appears on the clients server, so it can never be copied. That’s the theory.

How cool is that?!

Take a look at the movie here to see how it works:

But can it work?

Will it work?

Is this too good to be true?

Will Getty and Alamy introduce something similar?

Have GumGum got the patents on this technology sealed up nice and tight? Do they want to licence the technology to the big boys or do they want to become the web portal for licensing stock images for web media use?

Is this a better deal for the photographer than selling an image as unlimited use forever by RF for $49? I think so.

Time will tell…

PP

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Comment, Licensing, Photography Business, Stock Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “‘Adsense’ style pricing license for images…….can this work?”

  1. […] Source and Read More: thephotographybiz.com […]

  2. the answer to your question : no.

    if you did some research, you will find out that the people supporting the company are already the ‘big boys’.

  3. Hi shi,

    Why do you think it can’t work? I’d be interested to know.

    I posted about this the day I found it online (via the APE blog) and at that time there were no reference links to the ‘big boys’! Do you mean Getty and Corbis?

    GumGum seem to be showing themselves as “image hosts” rather than selling this technology on.

    PP

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