PicApp to Offer Bloggers Images…with Ads

Image licensing agency Corbis has taken the wraps off a new project that will let bloggers use copyrighted images on their sites for free...but they come with ads.

Bill Gates’ image licensing agency Corbis has long been known as one of the major stock photo houses on the planet, licensing millions of images for a myriad of purposes every year. But, of course, like the music industry, the photo licensing business has tended to view the rough and wild Internet as a hotbed of piracy and copyright infringement, often espousing that some 90 percent of online visual content represents some sort of copyright infringement. To licensing agencies, that means “lost revenue.”

To help bloggers “get legal”—and maybe produce a new revenue stream—Corbis plans to provide free access to a portion of its image llibrary for free—with the catch that the images act as an embedded advertisement. In conjunction with its digital partner PicScout, Corbis will participate with other image licensing agencies in PicApp. In some cases, ad content may be superimposed over the images; in other cases, embedded advertising may appear when a user mouses over or clicks an image. PicApp will track how images are being used, and PicApp will also offer bloggers a revenue-sharing opportunity: host PicApp images on your blog and get people to click on the images, you’ll get a share of the proceeds.

PicApp is in private testing now—interested parties can apparently request an invitation—and hasn’t yet announced when they plan to take the service public or what sort of sites will qualify for the free image service. PicScout’s other partners include major stock image agencies like Getty Images, Jupiter Images, Masterfile, and Image Source: the company hasn’t yet revealed which partners, other than Corbis, will be participating in PicApp.