Owing to the towering complaints by the Flickr users, its Toronto-based rival company, 500px, has gotten the opportunity to grow its consumer base substituting the Flickr’s consumer base. The number of users of 500px has risen from 1000 in 2009 to almost up to 85 thousand users today. Even more indicatively, around 45 thousand of these users just signed up for the service in last three months only. So after almost a rough rising since two years, now that the company is on its feet, and even startup has announced that it will be making a $525K Series A round in investment from High Line Venture Capital, Deep Creek Capital and ff Venture Capital.
Image via Wikipedia According to one of the founders of the company, Oleg Gutsol, “The idea of making 500px arose from Evgeny [Tchebotarev] and I having difficulties with the current available platforms — there wasn’t a good service that would allow us to display our photos is a visually pleasing way and be easy to use. I think we tried every somewhat popular service online and still were not quite satisfied. So we decided to build one ourselves.” While along with the second co-founder, Ian Sobolev, Gutsol translated his Livejournal-based photo sharing community to their freshly created current site on Halloween 2009. It had very little following, if any, and today after attracting the frustrated consumers of Flickr, the website is gathering optimistic praises from everywhere.
Even the big names of the Flickr community, including Thomas Hawk, Troy Holden and Ivan Makarov have transformed their photo-sharing service. While the flocks of Flickr users make the change as the website gew 60% in just the past 30 days only. Consequently the website boasts its huge 2.5 million page views in just the last month. Even after being expanded such largely, 500px is determined to stay loyal to its initial aims, which was to allow the photographers to have larger audiences. ”We encourage young talent,” stated Gutsol Tchebotarev. He added that “It is not uncommon to see someone new joining our site and have their photo appear in our popular feed in a matter of hours.”
Gutsol has intentions to use this newly acquired money for hiring better engineers as he hopes to build a “global platform” for digital photography. The current source of income for the company is mostly its $50 pro-account, which gives the users custom layouts along with the feature of selling their prints.
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