IStockphoto has just 3.2 million photos for sale - Flickr has over 3 billion images in its galleries. iStock’s 2007 revenue was a healthy $71.9 million, of which $20.9 million was distributed to members in royalties. Though the financials of the arrangement between Flickr and Getty are unknown, there is a ton of money to be had in crowd produced amateur stock photography. That sounds a lot better to us, and it likely would have been more profitable for Yahoo! - it certainly would have been more profitable for members. Supposedly, Flickr Stock would have been different and would have been open to all Flickr members. The partnership is exclusive and invite-only - Getty’s editors control who gets to participate. Under the terms of that deal, Getty would identify talented Flickr members and approach them about selling their images via a Getty’s marketplace. The project was apparently abandoned, however, and in July of last year Flickr announced a partnership with Getty Images. TechCrunch wrote today about a recent blog post by UX designer Sarah Cooper detailing her work on a cancelled 2007 project at Flickr called “Flickr Stock.” According to Cooper, “The concept of Flickr Stock was to create an online marketplace where existing Flickr users could offer photos for sale as well as purchase photos taken by others.”

About a year ago at the end of 2007, however, there apparently existed a plan that would have changed that. Had things gone differently a year ago, however, the defining stock photo site might have been Flickr.įlickr is currently the banner site for photo sharing, but users of the site are required choose a license that at the very least demands attribution (and generally limits use in some way) and selling photos isn’t facilitated. When you think stock photos, these days you likely think of crowd content web sites like iStockphoto or stock.xchng, rather than traditional, professionally sourced stock image companies like Getty Images (which actually owns iStockphoto) or Juperiterimages.

Flickr stock photos