The popular online image sharing platform 500px is continuing their expansion into marketing the work of their vast photographer user base to businesses. It started with their stock photo offerings, and now it is continuing with what is essentially on-demand photo work for businesses, something they are calling 500px for Business.
The premise behind the new feature is simple, a business fills out a brief that indicates what is going to be shot, locations they would like to have included, deadlines, and a budget. Then photographers go out and shoot the concepts, and then submit their images to the assignment. Following this step, the business is able to select the images from the pool that they feel fits their need and vision best and they are then able to exclusively license that image for their campaign.
The concept is not all that unlike what ImageBrief has been doing for some time now, except that it is within the 500px ecosystem and of course has some unique features. The big complaint with this style of work for hire, is that as a photographer you could put all of this time, money, and energy into submitting for one of these assignments, only to have your image not be chosen and your time/money/energy wasted. That said, it is a clear opportunity for those who feel they have the skills to accurately meet a client’s expectations.
In other news over at 500px, the site has announced that they will be introducing ads on the site for visitors who are not logged-in. So, this will really only affect visitors and not people who have an account there. The site hopes this will allow them to offset some of the costs of doing business and allow them to keep their free uploads free.
For more information on this new 500px for business feature and what it means for 500px photographers, you can head on over to the 500px website, here, for the full details.
