EyeEm to sell user images in partnership with Getty Images

Two weeks ago the makers of the photo app EyeEm started sending out email invitations to their users, offering to pre-register for the EyeEm Market in order to sell user images.

Today EyeEm has announced on its blog that it will run the EyeEm Market in partnership with stock image giant Getty Images. Florian Meissner, one of the co-founders of EyeEm and the company's CEO commented on the partnership:

“What sets EyeEm imagery apart is that our community is inspired by and captures an often unexpected look at the world around us. It´s heart- rather than art-directed – authentic, fresh and often hyper local. We call it real photography. And now because of our partnership with Getty Images and their extensive distribution network, members of our community will have a great opportunity to earn revenue from their creative work.”

The EyeEm Collection at Getty will be curated by the EyeEm team but users will have full control over which of their images they want to provide for inclusion. EyeEm says the terms of the platform are fair, easy and transparent. The users always retain the copyright of their images and make 50% net revenue from each sale. 

This is not the first time for a stock agency to partner with an online image platform. Alamy for example has been working with the Yahoo-owned Flickr for many years. However, unlike Flickr, EyeEm is predominantly a mobile platform with a large proportion of its images captured and/or edited on mobile devices. It'll be interesting to observe how the EyeEm curated images perform in the highly competitive stock image marketplace and if EyeEm's much larger competitor, Instagram, will make a similar move in the near future.