Photrade combines photo sharing and a stock photography licensing marketplace into a photo syndication service that helps photographers control and license their images.

While Photrade offers a variety of sharing and licensing services, most of the attention about Photrade will focus on one aspect of its business model, the advertising-supported photography licensing and syndication platform. Instead of defaulting to the traditional rights-managed and royalty-free licensing models, and eschewing the micro-stock pricing debate, the company offers the option for photographers to syndicate their images using an embed that combines the photograph and advertising. Essentially, in this option, instead of buying the photo, the “buyer” of the image uses the photograph and allows the photographer to get paid by the advertising attached to the photograph.

My thoughts:

• “Advertising-supported” is not the cure-all business model: Depending on advertising to pay for a value exchange is a terribly lazy business model. I’ll leave it at that, but for more of my thoughts on advertising-supported business models click here.
• Negative selection bias: While the idea surely has appeal to amateurs that are unable to sell photographs using other methods and outlets, I find it unlikely the service would appeal to any professional photographers, or even to any amateurs with higher-quality images. Quality images and quality photographers have a bevy of better, more economically-compelling opportunities.
• Loss of contextual control: Photographers (all artists) traditionally struggle with licensing their content to be used for advertising, but recognize the value and the opportunity to have their creative ideas out in the world. Artists are concerned about their personal brand, and artists are making an implicit (or explicit) statement by allowing a buyer to license their images. Giving up that control is a tough sell to an artist: and giving it up over the advertising-supported syndication platform pulls the ability for photographers to determine who is using the images and what it is used to advertise. Again, any photographer concerned with these issues simply will not use Photrade, contributing to the negative selection bias described above.
• Does not solve the buyer / seller exchange problem: More to the point, while it offers an opportunity for sellers, it doesn’t solve a problem for buyers. Getting cheap images is not difficult, micro-stock sites are abundant and easy to use. We may quibble about the quality of the images available by micro-stock, but Photrade surely won’t deliver higher-quality images than micro-stock.
• The problem is demand, not supply: In any case, the real problem in the photography business is not in the lack of supply of images, or expensive transaction costs, or not even about stolen images; it is that the demand for images has shifted, the way we consume images and their stories has changed, yet our business models are still based on the old models of value exchange.
• It is difficult to be everything to everyone in a crowded marketplace: Of course, the advertising-supported syndication platform is not the only things Photrade does. Besides the consumer-oriented photo sharing services, the site also offers traditional photography business licensing, flexible pricing, watermarking, image tracking and DRM (digital rights management) services. But Photrade is not unique: GumGum offers a similar licensing / syndication service, many, many sites offer traditional licensing and management platforms for stock sales (with the advantage of a depth of active buyers and sellers), and TinEye offers a more innovative way to track down how your images are used across the Internet. In short, the photo sharing, licensing and syndication marketplace is crowded with many companies, industry niches, buyers and sellers, and success requires a much tighter focus than Photrade is currently demonstrating.

In short, I am not high on Photrade and the business model. We can do better in creating new photography business models.

I’ll pause here. Your thoughts? Looking forward to your comments…

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Photrade coverage:

• Venturebeat: DEMOfall 08: Photrade lets photographers license and track their photos online
• Mashable: Photrade: Sell and Protect Your Stock Photos
• TechCrunch: PhoTrade Offers Ad Supported Photo Syndication
• CNET: Photrade lets photographers control their pictures, get paid for them