One of the first things I learned about when I started playing with business on the Web was photo licensing. If you are in the Web development space, you know that it can be incredibly expensive. Companies like Getty Images make a lot of money in photo licensing. A few years ago I got introduced to the business of image license of news sites. It became clear that blogs would have a disadvantage when it comes to being able to display images. They simply do not have the budget to acquire images the way major news sites can.
But like many other things in life, technology and creativity has stepped in to turn the tables. While reviewing a recent news story from Wired, I noticed some text under the images. This is usually saying something like “Images courtesy of AP News” or “Wired Images”. But instead it said, “Images courtesy of Flickr/username”.
I know Wired is not the small blog I was referring to, but still it’s awesome to see Flickr being used in this fashion. I’m going to try to start adding some Flickr images myself. From what I understand, they are using Creative Commons, which is of course saving us all (at least a little) from “the man”.
