Montreal-based Unsplash is an image-sharing website where users can post copyright-free high-resolution photos. Today, the platform claims to host over 400,000 high-resolution images, downloaded a total of over 310 million times. Now, after securing $7.25 million in investment funding, the organization is looking to digital currency.According to the team, users view over 2,000 Unsplash images online every second, making the website a significant competitor to its premium rivals like Shutterstock and iStock. However, for a platform of its size, the average user may question how Unsplash is making its money, and rightfully so. With all pictures on the website free for both commercial and personal use, it’s difficult to figure out where Unsplash is sourcing its revenue. “This past year, we watched Unsplash double nearly every 3 months,” said CEO Mikael Cho, in a post on Medium. “Unsplash has become a growth engine for creativity but we also know it needs to become an economic one too.”
Boasting its platform as a means of ‘creative freedom,’ Unsplash sought investor help to turn the popular website into a profitable one. “While we’ve had a front row seat to this significant shift in creative freedom...” said Cho. “There’s been another world-changing shift taking place for economic freedom.”Unsplash cites digital currency as a way of making the website economically viable without stopping its free-to-use principles. “The blockchain and cryptocurrency movement, largely popularized by Bitcoin, represents what many people see as the future operating system for the world’s transactions,” he added. “Many compare its potential impact to that of the internet. A once in a century type of shift.”As their gateway into digital currency, Unsplash announced a partnership with Simple Token (OST). The platform will enable communities to design and manage their own branded digital tokens.
Of Unsplash’s $7.25 million in recently accrued funding, the company reported that Simple Token was their leading investor. https://twitter.com/lukechesser/status/964165838646530048“We were growing fast but we weren’t going to figure out the right economic model with the amount of cash we had in the bank,” said Cho. “Our focus was to find the right investment partner who understood the importance of the Unsplash community [...] and was interested in working with us to define a new currency around photography.”According to the company, Simple Token makes it simple to create a blockchain-based economic system.
“The funds being invested today will be going toward defining a new economic model around photography,” said Cho. In his Medium post, Cho explained that not all photos will be purchased with digital currency. Instead, the company promises to maintain its free-to-use model and reward contributors, which it calls the ‘backbone’ of the platform. However, details are still unclear on how the company aims to achieve this goal. Regardless, Unsplash seeking digital currency solutions could signify a larger movement. Increasingly, digital currencies are creating unlikely revenue streams and new business models that allow people to contribute to things they enjoy while avoiding intermediaries.Image credit: Unsplash
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