Stock photo meets Web2.0

Photography, Technology — yichen on November 11, 2005 at 1:04 am

TechCrunch mentioned a new stock photo web site Fotolia.com, now count how many buzz words you can find:

New York based Fotolia is a new, specialized p2p ecommerce site that combines an innovative business model with Ajax, tagging, rss and great design.

The site is very well designed, and they’ve integrated Ajax previews of images along with photographer tagging of images for easier searching. They have multi-language support (including blogs in four languages) and RSS for all results pages.

Photographers can price their photos based on their rank, and the more they sell, the higher the rank is. As far as I know, iStockPhoto.com is already cheap enough to buy good photos. I don’t know how other people feel, but I am not very impressed with this site:

  • They just launched the site from beta, but the site is still very buggy, and the design is not as good as TechCrunch claimed.
  • The pricing policy is way too complicated. You need to read two full pages to understand how to price your photos.
  • This site is targeted to a even lower segment of stock photos, while iStockPhoto is already cheap enough. The photo quality is not very impressive, but who will want to price their photos from $1 if they are aready a good photographer?
  • This web site made it to TechCrunch, so I guess it is a Web2.0 version of iStockPhoto.com, but I doubt this is a Bubble 2.0. version. If you associate most of the Web2.0 buzz words with a traditional online service ( in this case, online stock photo agency), you get a new business idea. Maybe somebody can try this idea: A new online P2P auction web site, with easy searching, RSS feeds for all auction items, blogs for your auctions, easy tagging and multi-language support, and AJAX user experience.

    0 Comments »

    No comments yet.

    RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

    Leave a comment

    You must be logged in to post a comment.

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. | Yi Chen