I’m really excited today to announce that I have joined the advisory board of Photrade (picture is by Renee Blodgett and is Andrew Paradies, CEO of Photrade). You can read the press release here – but in short, Photrade is a company that excites me on numerous fronts and crosses two of my passions – photography and blogging.

Let me break it down into those two areas:

Photrade for Photographers

Store, Share, Protect and Make Money From Their Photos

Photrade offers photographers of all levels a number of services. At it’s heart is the ability to upload images to online photo albums where you can store and share your shots with the world – however added to this online albumn space is the option to sell copies of your images and to license them to other websites.

In short the vision is to provide a space for both pro and amateur photographers to Store, Share, Protect and Make Money From Their Photos.

I won’t go through the full feature list here and now (I’m obviously a bit biased and have therefore asked one of my DPS moderators to write up a review for DPS) but I’m excited by what I see Photrade developing for photographers. In the mean time you can check out a first impression review of Photrade at Read Write Web and see what TechCrunch had to say about it here.

Photrade for Publishers

Free Copyright Protected Images for Your Blog

Most bloggers and web publishers know the power of a good image to lift our articles and posts. They can set content apart from the rest – but issues of copyright can be something of a minefield to navigate. I know at b5media we’ve really gone through many options for working out how to license photos legally and it can become very time consuming and expensive to get the images we need.

Photrade has a system that awards photographers yet also protects publishers while giving them the photos that they need – for free. Here’s how it works (from their FAQ):

“Photrade’s adcosystem allows photographers to get paid for every view of their photos while providing free content to online publications. A photographer posts a beautiful photo of New York on Photrade.com to share within the adcosystem. A blogger, who is writing about New York searches for photos of New York and finds the perfect photo to fit the post.

The blogger grabs the sharing code from Photrade and posts the photo in their blog. When the blogger grabbed the code photrade put a small advertisement at the bottom of the photo, and also added text attributing the photo to the photographer (note: any/all watermarking remains on the photo).

Every time the photo is viewed the photographer earns a portion of the ad revenue generated by that image. So, the photographer gets attribution and payment for the use of their photo, advertisers get contextual in-content ads and publications get beautiful free images.”

Here is a little diagram of how it works.

Photrade is in beta so what you see over there isn’t the end product – however even in the few short months that I’ve been tracking with them I’ve seen some amazing advances in their technology and am so excited by what I see coming next.

Further Reading on Photrade

Check out what other bloggers and media sources are saying about Photrade:

• Mashable
• CNET
• PCMag

Lastly – let me share a video from Photrade who explains a little more of what it is and how it can be useful to both publishers and photographers.

Site Tour from photrade on Vimeo.

I hope this serves both as a disclosure of my involvement with Phototrade but also a helpful introduction to the company and services that they offer.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

I’ve Joined the Photrade Advisory Board