This reminds me of 500px. I used to be a huge fan of 500px. It was the most beautiful photography site on the internet, designed with attention to every tiny detail. It allowed you to share your photos under a CC license, presented them beautifully and had fantastic curated feeds with photos by fantastic photographers.<p>In 2018 they were acquired by an investor company and partnered exclusively with Getty. As a contributor, you were now pushed to "earn money with your pictures", CC licenses were discouraged and (I think) eventually removed. The site stopped getting optimized for aesthetics, it was now getting optimized for selling stock photos. I deleted all my photos and left.<p>I hope this doesn't happen to Unsplash. But I'm not optimistic.
My main association with Getty is their 'copyfraud' practises where they claim public domain images (NASA, Library of Congress etc) as their own and sell licenses[0]. They're also well known for aggressive acquisitions[1]. Perhaps this a good time to create a mirror<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Claiming_copyright_over_public_domain_content" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Claiming_copyrigh...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Acquisitions" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Acquisitions</a>
I'm going to instead see this as an <i>opportunity</i> for something better to emerge.<p>My biggest problem with Unsplash is that they did not use a standard license that would easily be compatible with a Creative Commons or open source licensed work. If I incorporated images from Unsplash, suddenly I couldn't say "you're welcome to do whatever you like with my work." In fact, they <i>used</i> to use a CC0 license, but then changed, because other sites were copying them. As a user, this was a feature, not a bug.<p>I would far prefer to see the community band together and produce an image sharing website with CC0 as the default license. Creative Commons image search right now is in need of some TLC from an engaged community.
> Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand and division of Getty Images. The entire Unsplash team will be staying and building Unsplash in the direction we have been. The main difference now is we have access to the resources and experience of Getty Images to help accelerate our plans to create the world’s most useful visual asset library.<p>Sounds so familiar.<p>How many times have we heard this one? How many times has it remained true in the long run?
Loved reading about their journey on HN. Here's a 5-year-old thread about their costs:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519085" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519085</a><p>Unfortunately the original link is down (and I could not find an archived version). But here's relevant material from the comments:<p>> $18k is a lot of money to spend each month. Understanding the scale of Unsplash though can help explain the costs.<p>> So at a cost of $18k per month you are getting 30M pages served, 140M API calls, 2.2M background jobs and 143TB of bandwidth. That sounds like a lot of bang for your buck.<p>> The biggest chunk is the bandwidth charges from imgix. They do appear to be giving you a break on their published pricing, but not a huge one ($0.075/GB vs $0.08/GB). The CDN they are using appears to be Fastly, which also has a published price of $0.08/GB. So, there doesn't appear to be any overzealous markup on imgix's part.
"This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand and division of Getty Images."<p>Sweet summer child
>> ... I’m excited about this acquisition ... because it’s not goodbye, it’s about acceleration<p>>> This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand and division of Getty Images.<p>>> Will Unsplash remain an independent brand?<p>Yes.<p>HAHA! You can't intentionally write parody this good! Just like every teenager swears they'll be nothing like their parents, every acquired startup swears nothing will change and their independence is preserved; why did you make a massive change to keep everything the same? Do you think Getty wants something for those bags of money they just handed you?<p>I'm not against acquisitions, on the contrary. I just expect everyone, including the author, to acknowledge that this sort of post is solely to allay their conscience, not that of staff or customers. Funny enough the same hubris is probably what aided their success in the first place...
”Intellectual property is the oil of the 21 century. Look at the richest men a hundred years ago; they all made their money extracting natural resources or moving them around. All today’s richest men have made their money out of intellectual property.“ –Mark Getty, founder of Getty Images<p><a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Getty" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Getty</a>
I've lived/worked through Getty's purchase and destruction of iStock. I'm not eager to watch Unsplash suffer the same fate. RIP to another great service.
I was wondering what Unsplash's business model was, and I stumbled onto [1]:<p><i>> Nor is it going to slap banner ads on every page of its website. Yes, it’s unveiling a digital advertising business, but Unsplash is taking a specific approach — working with companies to create branded photos, which will then appear on desirable searches.</i><p><i>> Square, for example, could upload photos of the Square Register, which will then show up when Unsplash users search for “cash register” and other terms.</i><p><i>> Brands working with Unsplash will get prominent placement in relevant searches, as well as their own brand channel, but Cho said the real impact only begins on the Unsplash website.</i><p>So basically, without you realizing it, you may end up with paid product placement in your presentations and (pointless) header images on your Medium articles.<p>Sometimes I wonder of the answer to the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter is: eventually all alien civilizations end up converting their entire society and economy into advertising monetization, all corporations consolidate into one giant inert behemoth, all real progress stops, and the species converts its entire planet into fuel for AdCoin cryptomining and winks out of existence.<p>I miss the days where people just, like, started businesses that charged people for stuff, and people bought that stuff, and the business stayed in business without having to be acquired or snuffed out by a megacorp.<p>[1]: <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/10/unsplash-for-brands/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/10/unsplash-for-brands/</a>
Getty already offers free images through embeddable content as well as brand partnerships, so it's natural for them to want a fresh injection of great work. Especially since their library has been rather stale for so long. It's hard to keep nice pictures coming in when photographers are getting royalty statements of only pennies. Of course, that's still more than Unsplash photographers receive. It will be interesting to see how Getty leverages this new model of 'images as ad network.'<p>The Unsplash dashboard features the number of image views/downloads very prominently and artists treat it as a kind of cachet. An image with 100,000 views at $2.00 CPM is what, $200? It's strange to me that photographers brag about their view counts when it's plain evidence of how much the company is making off their shadow labor. Credit to the Unsplash team for taking this dissonance to its apex - it really did require a new way of viewing images as assets that hadn't exist before. I'm hopeful that they can bring that kind of thinking to Getty. I'm not that hopeful that any photographer benefits from this new partnership.
><i>Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand</i><p>I hope this means that their current free offerings will continue.<p><a href="https://www.pexels.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pexels.com/</a> also offers similar free collections.
Unsplash has a great product, however for Getty this seems to be a good deal more because they eliminate a competitor than because they acquire a good product/team.<p>I read that Unsplash's plan to monetize was to sell banner ads and branded image placement, but that's gotta make less money than Getty slapping their normal business model onto Unsplash, right?
Nature’s first green is gold,<p>Her hardest hue to hold.<p>Her early leaf’s a flower;<p>But only so an hour.<p>Then leaf subsides to leaf.<p>So Eden sank to grief,<p>So dawn goes down to day.<p>Nothing gold can stay.<p>-- Robert Frost
I was a contributor [0] to their second batch of photos (the first with user-generated content) when they initially launched under the name Ooomf because I love the philosophy of open-source. They even published an open-source photography book [1], which I was featured in [2]. It is very cool to stumble across my images across the web.<p>The initial model was to receive a handful of user-generated photos, then handpick 10 each week and feature them [3]. I don't even see this feature page anymore.<p>However, we all know that once you sell, you lose control of the product. While on day one the service will still exist, I doubt it will be around with its current philosophy for much longer, especially since Getty has already stolen all my images from 500px that do not have people (so they can sell them without releases).<p>[0]: <a href="https://unsplash.com/@css" rel="nofollow">https://unsplash.com/@css</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://book.unsplash.com/" rel="nofollow">https://book.unsplash.com/</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/bSmKli4OTIY" rel="nofollow">https://unsplash.com/photos/bSmKli4OTIY</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://unsplash.com/collections/5/collection-%235%3A-crew" rel="nofollow">https://unsplash.com/collections/5/collection-%235%3A-crew</a>
If you want to create a free public resource do it, if you want to create a for profit business, by all means do that too. But for the love of all that's holy please stop trying to pretend you're making a free public resource and then backdooring in some crappy business model or exit strategy.
This demonstrates rather plainly that the paranoia (from myself and others) around the "Unsplash license" was warranted.<p>> In 2016, we first met the Getty Images team.<p>"...and then changed our default license within a year of that meeting to make it more palatable to corporate ownership and ensure that users don't have leverage to object. Totally a coincidence, nothing to do with entertaining buyouts, no siree."<p>> This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down.<p>...said pretty much every company that was bought to be shut down.
I could imagine tightening collaboration with Getty which could make sense, but once you let somebody acquire you, the game is over. No promise can hold.<p>Can someone link me a list acquisition promises that new owners of various businesses broke in the past? There must be one.
> This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down.<p>Translation: This is one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down.<p>I wonder if it sounds as ridiculous to the one writing it as it does to someone reading.
RIP. I'm sure this acquisition will be great for the team but it's pretty obvious Getty will fill the site with tricky sponsored images. They will also likely start fading out new free images until the site is mostly stale or filled with sponsored image links. I could also see them playing around with image licensing so it's less obvious how you can use them. Welp, I guess there's always Pexels.
Alternatives that I have been using:<p>- <a href="https://stocksnap.io" rel="nofollow">https://stocksnap.io</a><p>- <a href="https://www.pexels.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.pexels.com</a>
Very curious :Any info on what there revenue was? From what I've read/seen they were experimenting with a bunch of methods, but nothing seemed to really work (could be wrong). How much did they get acquired for?
I'm very worried about this, as I've been using Unsplash's images for a lot of my blog posts. I'm just wondering how this will affect users of Unsplash's images in the long-term? Will we have to take down all our content that makes use of Unsplash imagery, in case Getty places a new license on the images or requires a fee to use the images? Or will they stay free?
It's so hard to predict what will happen now that this acquisition has taken place. Unsplash was too good to be true, and now their time has come.
Wasn't Getty responsible for the removal of direct links from Google Images?<p>As always, with stuff like this: doesn't bode well, hope they don't screw it up, but my expectations are low.
Is someone interested to build an open source alternative with me? Donation based to cover the server costs. Maybe the chance to pay for the service if you want to maintain a private image library (somehow like the previous Github pricing model was). Building a feature to allow Unsplash user to migrate their images with a single click. Code and content under MIT. Allowing videos, too. I would prefer Ruby on Rails as framework.
Does anyone know what happened to the original ~200k images with CC0 licenses on Unsplash, and how they can be found?<p>For context: <a href="https://creativecommons.org/2017/06/22/unsplash/" rel="nofollow">https://creativecommons.org/2017/06/22/unsplash/</a><p>"Following the switch to the new Unsplash-branded license, there is no marking of works that were previously shared in the public domain using CC0. The Unsplash API restricts/obscures the full CC0 collection, which we believe to be about 200,000 images, but it isn’t possible to access the complete archive. In order to ensure that the commons is maintained, we hope that Unsplash will either a) properly mark all the works shared using CC0 and/or b) make available a full archive of the CC0 works so they can be shared on a platform that supports open licensing and public domain tools. Previous platforms that have gone under or abandoned open license tools have shared their CC archives for this purpose. We hope Unsplash will follow the same path."
> After interacting with the team at Getty Images more and better understanding their long-term vision, we realized we shared so much alignment that going at this together could be much more impactful than going at it separately.<p>Of course they will say that now, but isn't Unsplash a direct threat to Getty's bottom line?<p>Unsplash images are free for commercial and non-commercial purposes with no permission needed. The only limitation is that you can't sell them or start a competing service.<p>How long before this changes?
They also did a FAQs page about it:<p><a href="https://help.unsplash.com/en/articles/5097983-unsplash-getty-images-faq" rel="nofollow">https://help.unsplash.com/en/articles/5097983-unsplash-getty...</a>
Has anyone made a complete archive of Unsplash, so that at least when Getty shut it down ("in order to serve customers metter by focusing on our core business") the images that have already been uploaded there will remain available?
I am unclear why Getty Images would be interested, unless the purchase price was less than the cost of internally building its own loss leader open source image site that allows them to try to upsell to “premium” photos.<p>Users have limited loyalty to any particular source of “free”. Getty presumably has a far larger library from which to pull images, so there can’t be any advantage to Unsplash’s library.<p>I am guessing it was a very low purchase price.
I recently discovered Pexels for anyone looking for other sources after this.<p><a href="https://www.pexels.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.pexels.com</a>
I have been browsing Unsplash for five or six years now. I remember the time when it did not have ads to the how it is now. I understand the owner might not have been earning a lot from the site, so I get that he wanted to cash out. I just hope that the content remains of high quality and open source if possible.
I just use <a href="https://search.creativecommons.org" rel="nofollow">https://search.creativecommons.org</a>.<p>Any photo I want/need is available, and I already clearly know the license. Unsplash etc. are good, but this is solid.
Well, you certainly don’t acquire a company without trying to make a profit off it that’s the bottom line. how are they going to make back the offer they gave to unsplash if they don’t make money by monetizing it??
We knew it would happen and with the bills they had to pay each month I understand the decision. I just wish Unsplash will not become another item on a list of services Getty killed/made worse.
I have to say this kind of announcement sticks in the craw. I get that Mikael Cho and colleagues created Unsplash and it's theirs to do with as they please: they don't owe us anything. But really, couldn't they just come right out and say "They offered us too much money, we couldn't resist, So long, suckers"?
What makes Unsplash so special? I've browsed it in the past and yea, it has some really nice pictures. Why would artists post their work (for free) there instead of another site?
does anyone have any guesstimates about their business side of things? i know they raised a series A focused on crypto (<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/unsplash-simple-token-series-a/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/unsplash-simple-token-seri...</a>) but ironically they seem to have completely missed out on this NFT wave.<p>serving up that many images every day is costly. im guessing they ran out of money.
> This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down.<p>I’ll believe it when I see it. I didn’t know there was any other kind of tech acquisition.
I had to prevent many employees from using Unsplash with people because they don't have a model release and most startup people don't know what that is.
Quick, pull the non-rate-limited API keys out of the unsplash desktop app with strings and start mirroring it from Tor (which they don't block).<p>The images are public domain.
> this is not one of those acquisitions<p>> will continue to operate as a stand-alone business<p>Sounds funny after you read the exact same words for the 17th time!
I am the CEO at Scopio, www.scop.io/submit the most diverse photographer community. Visit us and join us. You can also see us on @scopioimages. We have the most talented artists in 150 countries and people get paid and build their network and careers. A real community for the underdog. Tons of perks and other opps once in.
Apologies if it’s super obvious to the rest of the people here, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what Unsplash offers? It’s not at all clear from the website, at least to me. Not intended as an attack, more as a PSA to make your purpose extremely obvious for the dumb people like me :)
If you still want to upload your awesome shots to a community that might use them for their projects, I highly recommend Creative Market (<a href="https://creativemarket.com/kirill" rel="nofollow">https://creativemarket.com/kirill</a>).<p>Started uploading photos there a few years ago, and I still get a payment every few months.<p>You don’t have to charge a lot for your photos, but this way it’s something to keep you/site going, while also sharing what you have with the world.
Potentially unpopular opinion: Good.<p>I am tired of people just putting large images into their websites where the main image is barely relevant to the rest of the page. It was sloppy and lazy, like modern day clip art.<p>And if someone really wants images, there are paid services like envato that are at least somewhat sustainable. These solutions are really affordable now and they've got very decent licensing terms.