EyeEm Purchased by Freepik, Photographers Finally Get Paid
German stock photography company EyeEm has been purchased by Freepik, a platform that provides images and other media.
EyeEm filed for bankruptcy back in April after photograhers complained that they had stopped receiving money owed.
EyeEm’s new owner have reportedly started on a good footing as they begin paying at least some of the photographers that the company owes money to.
WOW i woke up to a payment from Eyeem & and email saying they’re ready to start over lol seems they finally are paying photographers what they owed and have new management pic.twitter.com/XSzvF4keCb
— ☾ (@alexiswore) October 12, 2023
Stock photographer Robert Kneschke also reported that he was paid outstanding payments by the new management. “Those two emails definitely made my night,” he adds.
Freepik x EyeEm
In an interview with Tech Crunch, Freepik’s CEO Joaquin Cuenca Abela Abela signaled his intention to get off to a good start with the photo community by honoring the payments that were supposed to have paid to EyeEm photographers many months ago.
EyeEm’s existing photo library of approximately 160 million images will be integrated into Freepik’s offering with the Spanish-based company also receiving access to a community of 150,000 photographers.
“We had photos already but ours were not good enough,” Freepik’s CEO Joaquin Cuenca Abela tells Tech Crunch. “EyeEm has a big library and community, and it’s a way of getting more photos on our platform.”
Abela also adds that Freepik plans to monetize more of EyeEm’s content and wants to explore AI options.
“We see many people use AI, and we think of it like another tool, like a camera: some people will be better at using AI in pictures than others,” he adds.
It is not clear how much Freepik has paid for EyeEm, but in 2021 Talenthouse AG paid $40 million for EyeEm. However, things did not go well as only a few months later it was valued at a single-digit million amount.
Since then, Talenthouse, a creative platform from the U.K., struggled financially and put EyeEm in bankruptcy to stave off its own collapse.
EyeEm has been on quite the journey: When it was founded in 2011, just a year after Instagram, it was regularly talked of in the same breath. However, EyeEm founders studiously repeated that it was a place for high-end content creators and photographers to sell their wares.
