How does Unsplash make money?
Free HD Stock Photo website
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This is Edition #8 of the newsletter. You can find the previous editionsĀ here.
About Unsplash
Unsplash.com is a stock photography sharing website. The website claims over 195K contributing photographers and generates more than 11 billion photo impressions per month on their growing library of over 1.9 million photos.
You would have seen the Unsplash images as stock photos or placeholders in Medium articles, Superhuman email app backgrounds, Apple TV backgrounds and HD wallpapers.
Hereās an excerpt from an interview with Unsplash founder Mikael Cho
We were doing these photos for our homepage, we were like, āThis is still a really crappy process, to try to find good photos that you could very clearly use.ā So when we did a photo shoot and we had all of these leftovers, we thought, āWhat if we just created that ideal site that we just kept looking for and couldnāt find?ā Every image was high resolution.
So we built that in just an afternoon, with 10 photos, and we were going to do 10 photos every 10 days, because we actually didnāt know how we were going get any more photos than that. So we figured we could keep up with 10 every 10 days if we needed to ourselves, and I just put a little āSubmitā link on the site. Unsplash was actually available as a domain, so that was 9 dollars, and the Tumblr theme was 19 dollars. So in total we spent 28 dollars and about three hours putting it up. I actually put it up on Hacker News, didnāt think anything of it. I thought maybe a few hundred people would find it useful, and that was good enough for me.
We had 20,000 people signed up within those first couple of hours.
Stats
š£2013 Founded
š©āš»11B Photo Impressions per month
šø$10.3M Raised
How Unsplash makes money
Lead Generation for parent company Crew
Unsplash, until 2017, was a lead generation engine for its parent company Crew - which was a marketplace connecting designers & developers to who needed its services. Users would come to Unsplash to find photos and if they needed design & development services, they would hire freelancers from Crew. Crew was sold to Dribbble in 2017.
Unsplash for Brands
In their 2019 announcement, Unsplash said
We launched Unsplash for Brands, a new kind of advertising for the internet. One that doesn't have to be annoying or creepy to work.
When you search for stock-photos for Laptop or Office, Googleās Chrome Book or Microsoft Surface sponsored pictures are promoted. These pictures are then picked up by major publications (who already use Unsplash images) and are distributed to millions of users.
Some examples for Square & Google Chromebook:
Future - Blockchain
Simple Token lead the last funding round for Unsplash. In the announcement, Simple Tokenās CEO said
Blockchain technology is a perfect fit for Unsplash.Ā The existing online stock marketplaces simply brought the old print model online.Ā Unsplash and OST will utilize blockchain to create the new model and the new currency for photography.
The way I see it, Unsplash can use Blockchain to track the chain-of-creation-and-distribution. Imagine calculating the number of impressions an Unsplash image received after being circulated across thousands of publications/blogs - the brand pays a cost-per-impression which is shared by Unsplash and the creator - win-win!
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This is really cool, dude
Hope youāre still doing these