The recent CEPIC Congress proved fruitful in making alliances for PicScout. The San Francisco-based company announced picking up more than 50 new photo-agency clients at the stock industry’s largest international gathering.
Reassuring for these new clients, PicScout has also been spending a considerable amount of resources on courting designers and the broader professional image-buying segment. The company recently attended two HOW magazine events and the Creative Freelancer Conference, where vice president of marketing and business development Amy Love spoke.
Netbooks, a popular alternative to the larger laptop, are expected to give way to tablet computers like the iPad by 2012, according to Forrester Research. By 2015, nearly one in four PCs will be a tablet, and PicScout says this will fuel a dramatic increase in image use. The graphical interface of such devices creates the need for additional images, and image availability is more critical then ever.
PicScout ImageIRC offers agencies a venue to get images to market, while protecting them at the same time. Notably, the paid promotional option—the pay-per-click links to stock agencies that license a given image—is offered separately from the free image credit. Available to everyone, registering visual content with ImageIRC adds the image to the database, which in turn displays owner information to users of the ImageExchange Firefox add-on.
At CEPIC, particularly at the workshops that focused on the online environment, much discussion centered around creating new revenue streams. According to PicScout, ImageIRC offers just that to agencies: new revenue coming from image buyers who increasingly favor search engines.