The Canada-based online photography community, 500px, closes its Marketplace.
Marketplace has been around since 2014. But with 500px shutting it down, it's 13 million users around the world have lost the ability to buy and sell photos through its own online service. The in-house Marketplace has allowed users to share their work with content creators, to remix them in their project under the Creative Commons licenses.
Instead, users should rely on a royalty-free 500px License that distributes pictures exclusively through either Getty or VCG (Visual China Group, which acquired 500px in February) in China.
500px said that creators' royalties won't change if they had photos uploaded to its servers, and said that users can reach a much wider marketplace with Getty and VCG. Photographers who want to opt out of global distribution have the option to do so.
But with the Marketplace closing, creators no longer have full control over how they share photos.
500px explained its decision to kill off its CC-licensed image search was driven by the fact that not many people were using it.
The company said in its contributor FAQ, that Marketplace "hasn’t performed as well in the stock photography space as hoped," and that it "had to choose between" investing more in building the platform, or finding a new revenue model.
This marks the end of what's left of 500px' history as a social photo sharing service.
Founded in 2009, 500px initially served as a community for those serious photographers which wanted to share their work.
500px has even turned its platform into an Instagram-like design dedicated for those professionals.
However, the community faced pressure from multiple directions.
Some of which, was from Flickr, a heavy rival of 500px that caught photographers' attention for showcasing their work. And when Instagram took off as one of the most popular photo-sharing platform on the internet, 500px was further pushed out of the picture.
The reasons why 500px was acquired by VCG in the first place, and 500px in having a Getty pact, are acknowledgments that the online photography landscape has changed a lot.