San Francisco, CA, Oct. 06, 2009. WordPress.com bloggers searching for real-time photos of Juan Martin Del Potro, Rob Pattinson and Michelle Obama or looking for photos of a sunset in Yosemite Park, the Eiffel Tower, a wild flower, baby laughing, or an urban spa can now use PicApp to add relevant images to their posts. The content partners include, among others, Getty Images, Corbis, Newscom, Zuma Press, Image Source, Jupiterimages and Pacific Coast News.
Automattic, which leads the Open Source WordPress project and runs WordPress.com, announced today that it is enabling PicApp's embed code on its WordPress.com platform, allowing its millions of bloggers access to real time, premium, legal and free images provided by PicApp. WordPress has 7.5 million bloggers, 37 million posts and 1.2 billion page views per month, and is considered one of the most innovative and fastest growing blog platforms.
Unlike other content syndication product that include intrusive advertising, the PicApp solution uses a subtle and user friendly approach that lets the end users engage with more related photos on its photo gallery pages.
"Publishers have always shown a strong interest in enhancing their content with top quality images, and we are excited to help that effort by working with PicApp and making their images available on WordPress.com," Raanan Bar-Cohen, Vice President of Media Services, Automattic Inc said. "PicApp's wide selection of content along with the appropriate copyrights and unobtrusive advertising approach represented the key factors for WordPress.com."
PicApp enables publishers to easily search and insert images into posts, it has access to 20 million images covering entertainment, sports, news, travel, fashion, nature, food, and more, with 10,000 images being updated daily. PicApp images, which come fully tagged with metadata, are indexed by image-search engines thus promoting blog Search Engine Optimization.
"Making PicApp available to the millions of WordPress.com publishers is an exciting day for us, and an important milestone on our way to become the ultimate source of images servicing the blogosphere," said Eyal Gura, CEO, PicApp. "Our image distribution solution is the only one to fully respect and credit the content creators while providing the publishers with added values of content, SEO and user engagement."
News and photo agencies licensing images via PicApp include, among others, Getty Images, Corbis, Newscom, Fame Pictures, Admedia Photo, Entertainment Press, Zuma Press , Image Source and Pacific Coast News. Displaying ads on image photo gallery page provides a monetization tool on the content owner's behalf.
About Automattic Inc.
Automattic (www.automattic.com) is the company behind WordPress, the #1 open source blogging platform, and Akismet, the first managed comment spam prevention service for bloggers.
About PicApp
PicApp (www.picapp.com) offers online publishers and bloggers a single source for millions of premium quality and free images to use legally and enhance their sites. News and photo agencies licensing images to PicApp include, among others, Getty Images, Corbis, Zuma Press, and Newscom with new content partners added frequently to meet its global expansion goals. PicApp has over 20 million images with over 10,000 images updated daily; covering all types of editorial and creative image categories. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has a development and operations center in Herzelia, Israel and is financially backed by Carmel Ventures.
It will be very interesting in the next future to know what will be the advantage for photographers and photo agencies. I'm starting to believe that in these days small is beautiful in the photo industry.
Posted by: Pino Granata | October 14, 2009 at 12:13 PM