[masona]

Getty already offers free images through embeddable content as well as brand partnerships, so it's natural for them to want a fresh injection of great work. Especially since their library has been rather stale for so long. It's hard to keep nice pictures coming in when photographers are getting royalty statements of only pennies. Of course, that's still more than Unsplash photographers receive. It will be interesting to see how Getty leverages this new model of 'images as ad network.'

The Unsplash dashboard features the number of image views/downloads very prominently and artists treat it as a kind of cachet. An image with 100,000 views at $2.00 CPM is what, $200? It's strange to me that photographers brag about their view counts when it's plain evidence of how much the company is making off their shadow labor. Credit to the Unsplash team for taking this dissonance to its apex - it really did require a new way of viewing images as assets that hadn't exist before. I'm hopeful that they can bring that kind of thinking to Getty. I'm not that hopeful that any photographer benefits from this new partnership.