Like Etsy, New York based Fotolia is a new, specialized p2p ecommerce site that combines an innovative business model with Ajax, tagging, rss and great design.
Fotolia launched yesterday.
Fotolia is a site where photographers can sell their images directly to consumers. They offer only royalty free images (Getty Images, for instance, offers a mix of royalty free and rights managed images). Photographers keep up to 80% of fees.
Three types of rights may be purchased – web only, print only, and exclusive buyout. The exclusive buyout option results in the image being removed from the site,and no futher sales of the image are made after that.
Fotolia has created an innovative pricing system to encourage use by photographers and manage the user experience. Photographers may price photos within certain ranges determined by their rank. The more sales a photographer has, the higher their rank. Prices start at zero and can be as high as $2,000 for an exclusive buyout.
The site is very well designed, and they’ve integrated Ajax previews of images along with photographer tagging of images for easier searching. They have multi-language support (including blogs in four languages) and RSS for all results pages.
After a 6 month limited beta, Fotolia now has 100,000 images online.
