500px Closes Marketplace, No More CC Images

Photography community and marketplace 500px has announced it is closing its marketplace and will license the work from its contributors exclusively through Getty Images. This comes after the company was acquired by VCG, the Getty Images partner in China.

With this change 500px is also removing the option to download images on a Creative Commons (free) license. This impacts 1 million images.

The move makes 500px a crowd sourced production house for Getty Images with no means of distribution/sales on its own website

For those with images on 500px there is a lot more information available on the changes and the direct impact on contributors:

 

Engadget Photo platform 500px is ditching its efforts to help you buy and sell photosthrough its own online service. The company has closed its in-house Marketplace as of July 1st, and will now rely on moving photos through Getty Images in most of the world as well as VCG (which acquired 500px in February) in China. Your royalties won’t change if you had photos on 500px, but don’t expect to have full control over how you share photos — the company is scaling things back, at least for now.

Resourcemag online The move, however, isn’t quite as simple as it seems at first blush—after all, we’re talking about moving an enormous photo library and its distribution and purchasing mechanisms onto a third-party site. While some kinks are still in need of ironing (I’ll get to that later), here’s what we do know so far about the move

Petapixel  But overnight, all of the CC photos that have been uploaded since 2012 have been nuked from 500px. Users can no longer choose a CC license during uploading, search for CC photos, or download them. And prior to the wipeout, 500px provided no migration path for 500px users wishing to keep their CC photos on the service alive.

The Verge  Buried in its contributor FAQ are some drastic shifts for 500px: the company explains that Marketplace “hasn’t performed as well in the stock photography space as hoped,” and that it “had to choose between” investing more in building the platform, or simply finding a new revenue model. The Marketplace operated through June 30th, and now, photographers who have signed up for distribution will have their images transferred over to either Visual China Group (if they’re in China), or to Getty Images (if they’re anywhere else in the world). 500px notes that the royalty rates for photographers won’t change, and that its users will reach a much wider marketplace. Photographers who want to opt out of global distribution have the option to do so.