One of the buzziest buzzwords today is “blockchain.” Now blockchain has entered the world of photography.
What is blockchain? Very simply put, blockchain, once deployed over many computers, becomes a verifiable, sustainable, string of recorded pieces of data through which content and transactions can be tracked, without any possibility of illicit copies or under-the-table transactions.
The applications for this technology seem endless — from the now well-known Bitcoin, to combating voter fraud and everything in between. But an Israeli company called Wemark is applying this technology to stock photography, with a stated aim of disrupting the traditional model used by the big stock photography websites.
In a piece on Medium, Tai Kaish, co-founder and CEO of Wemark, explains that their technology intends to remove the middleman — the traditional stock photo brokers — from the equation. The transactions over their platform occur directly between the photographer and the buyer. Kaish says: “In simple words, it allows us to sign a distribution contract with sellers for every item they list — we get 15% of each transaction, they get 85%. The contract is public and cannot be changed — not by us, not by the seller, not even by Chuck Norris.”
In further news, Wemark has announced what’s called an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). This means that they’re going to be selling a digital currency based on cryptocurrency technology to help finance their company. This digital currency will also be used on their website to license images through their platform’s blockchain.
Wemark’s ICO will begin on May 7th. And though their marketplace is not yet live, Wemark says that it already has 3,000 photographers and content creators who have committed to selling photos through their platform.
What does this mean for photographers? It’s still too early to be making predictions, but any platform that pays photographers 85 percent of revenue from sales of their photos can’t be all bad, can it? And one might guess that if Wemark is successful, the big boys of stock photography might take notice and start making the revenue model on their sites more favorable to the content creators. Interesting times may lie ahead.
