With a fresh $225 million in its pocket, Pinterest is gearing up to spend a little of it. The company today is announcing a deal with Getty Images - the image agency that holds digital rights to some 80 million still images and illustrations and over 50,000 hours of stock film footage - which will see the photo agency provide Pinterest with metadata for Getty photos that get used on Pinterest's image-sharing platform. In exchange, Pinterest will pay Getty a fee for that metadata as it starts to get added in the coming weeks.
Exact financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but offering a fee for image metadata is a first for Pinterest. Up to now, Pinterest has offered traffic to partners for more data - such as in the case of the recent article pins it introduced, or the Flickr deal from last year that added a Pin-it button to Flickr.com and Flickr backlinks for images posted on Pinterest.
“As part of our agreement, we'll pay Getty Images a fee for the data they share and will help make sure that their images get proper attribution,” Pinterest notes today. “We're just getting started with Getty Images but we're excited about the possibilities of what their data can help us deliver.”
Shareaholic recently noted that Pinterest is the second-biggest referrer of traffic on the Internet after Facebook, so for consumer sites based around advertising and (hence) traffic, this makes sense. But in the case of Getty, traffic is less important than the data it is able to provide about the images that it holds.
For Pinterest, it will be able to use this data to provide more detail to its users about what it is that they are looking at - including photographers' names, and what it is, exactly, that is in the picture.
But it sounds like Pinterest will also go much deeper with that data. For example, in the example of the picture of scallops with brussels sprouts illustrated here, Pinterest will be able to use the metadata to suggest more pins for recipes using those ingredients, or maybe more images from Thomas Barwick (the photographer). That will make it more likely that a user will spend more time on Pinterest looking at more content. And creating a stronger web of linked pins will also help Pinterest then monetize against that content better - more tags to match against relevant ads, and more of the all-important “engagement” that has become such an important metric for social media sites.
While Pinterest these days sometimes leads people to “dead ends” when there is not enough information about a picture that has been shared - a fetching handbag, yes, but who is the designer? - this potentially will open up more avenues for users to travel further, so to speak (at least where Getty pictures are concerned).
Getty says that it will be providing two pieces of technology for this service. The first is its PicScout image recognition technology - which will crawl Pinterest to identify Getty Images on Pinterest. It will then link up those images with Getty's metadata using its Connect API. “We'll get a photo credit for our images on Pinterest's site and a link back. Pinterest users get more context and have more fun,” Getty noted today.
The service will go live first with Getty Images house content and will later expand also to iStock content and other Getty collections.
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