Back in August of 2009, with great fanfare, PicScout announced PicApp, and we took a critical (and dim) view of it, as we wrote about here - Silly Rabbit - PicApp's Got Problems (8/19/2009). The concept was - free photos for your non-commercial blog/etc, and we'll intersperse some ads among or overtop of the images, and make money that way.
We said it was a bad design then, and, more importantly, we said it made no business sense then, and on their blog here (12/23/2010)
"...the demand was not sufficient to commercially justify this as our core business model, which is why we have decided to terminate the Picapp images search....".Right. Because it was poorly designed, made no business sense, and was also likely competing with the sources of the images (Getty/et al), and they didn't like it either. Paul Melcher does a fine job of taking a critical look at PicApp here - so I won't rehash what he wrote, other than to say "we told you so."
Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.
This is an interesting idea, but it's so much easier to get photos using the WP plug in Photo Dropper. I don't know how long Photo Dropper has been around, but as a blogging savant, I'm all about easy. Flickr is easy.
ReplyDeletePlus their images just looked a mess with all the extras overlayed on top.