500px

What is 500px?

500px is a non-recommended online photography marketplace for professional photographers.

Danger

500px has been accused of selling photographers' work to third parties and underpaying them through shady licensing practices, specially since its acquisition in 2018 by the Visual China Group.

500px has been acquired by Visual China Group (VCG), the Beijing, China-based photo and media agency that’s known as “the Getty Images of China.”

"Feb 26, 2018" [https://petapixel.com/2018/02/26/500px-acquired-vcg-getty-images-china/] (accessed 2024-10-13)

Photographers that upload their photos to 500px seem to allow 500px to sell them for any amount of dollars, giving 500px complete discretion on how to market, package, and sell their work, and even what percentage is their cut. They make this sound good because they can manage the sale of your photography while you just focus on your craft. In practice, it means 500px could just take their users' photos and sell them for cheap to attract business customers such as Adobe Stock (Fotolia) and Getty Images, and then when the user gets paid, it may be an amount they would never agree to sell for.

Years back, before they'd gotten bought by the Chinese company, I had my images up there and made about $100. Then one day, someone says they saw one of my photos on an ad for smartphones. Sure enough, my image was in ads everywhere, on billboards, in cell phone shops and… it was the default background screen for an entire line of phones!

"Great!" I thought. "I must be rich!"

So I logged into 500px to see my earnings… nope, just a few $20 licenses.

So I sent the cell phone company a cease and desist along with a bill. They were very nice and explained they'd licensed it from a local (to them) Chinese stock photo company. I contacted them and they said they got it from 500px. I contacted 500px and they told me that, as part of my agreement to sell photos on their site, I agreed for "international licensing agreements" which entitled me to… $20… and I'd already been paid. (Of course I didn't read that in the fine print.)

Photographer Micah Burke (IG: @micahbburke) https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/18xq5dm/comment/kg6mgos/ (accessed 2024-10-13)

It's also worth noting that after the acquisition 500px stopped allowing royalty-free stock photography in the website, e.g. Creative Commons-license photography. This means even if a photographer wanted to license their work as royalty free, the platform wouldn't allow them to. According to the company, this move was made to make more money.

500px has announced that it will be winding down its Marketplace for premium royalty-free stock photos and will instead be selling its users photos exclusively through Visual China Group (its parent company) in China and through Getty Images across the rest of the world.

[...]

“This is part of a strategic repositioning of 500px’s network of contributors and the licensable content they submit to 500px,” 500px writes. “These changes enable 500px to serve the needs of a broader cohort of visual media customers, and represent a significant revenue opportunity for the company and its contributors.”

"Jun 01, 2018" [https://petapixel.com/2018/06/01/500px-to-shutter-marketplace-and-sell-photos-through-vcg-and-getty-images/] (accessed 2024-10-13)

Someone made a video highlighting other issues with 500px: