But the original way that even humans communicated was drawings and visuals. The cave wall didn't scale that well. So then you started to have language, right? So you could vocalize and things spread faster. And the internet was good with text, but what's happened with improving bandwidth and quality of the internet, it's just like becoming all visual. And we that's much more communicative and much more rich of a medium.
Today, I'm here with Michael Cho and Luke Beller, who are the co founders of Unsplash. And we're gonna get to know them and talk through their founder journey and then get into some of the learnings they've had, tactics and philosophically around how psychology works and then where the advertising model is going on the internet. So good to have you guys here today. Thanks for having us. I heard about you from Eric Ward, our creative director here at Halifax 3 years ago.
And he said, you know, there's this really interesting photo form that I'm using and that I think is great, and you guys should meet these guys. And we thought it was very cool what you were doing. And so we've known about you a long time. And Eric, I think become maybe one of your top 100 contributors. We're gonna learn about that, but it's through him that we've gotten to know you guys, and it's really great to have you here.
I'd love to understand sort of your founder journey from the beginning. For where where are you now? You're in Montreal. Right? Yeah. That's right. And you've got how many employees? 22. And you've raised how much? We've raised 10,000,000. The reason why it's an interesting pause there is because on splash was a spin up. We'll talk more about that story. Great. And so on splash, if I go to the website, What do I see there today? What do I do?
It's all high resolution images that you can use for anything. And if I'm a photographer, I upload them there, and then I have people find my photos, That's correct. And the definition of photographer is sort of evolving. People who contribute on non splash, you don't need to be a in fact, a lot of people who contribute images there consider themselves to be amateurs. Got it. And if that's the photographer side of your marketplace, Who's on the other side? The other side is creators.
And it it's all the way from sort of an independent creator to mainstream major publishers. Got it. And they'll come on to look for the photos that they wanna use in their creative works, whether it's from a marketing purpose for business, or whether it's just expressing themselves. That's correct. Amazing. Okay. And look, you guys have a ton of buzz in the creative community. I hear a bunch everywhere. I see links to you guys showing up everywhere.
Wonderful to see this sort of spread, this sort of virus around the internet sort of like horizontal photos platform that is now being used a little bit like I experienced when I invested in flicker in 2003. I'd love to understand the founder journey. You guys started in 2013, and then what happened? Yeah. UnSplash wasn't supposed to be a company in the beginning. We had started another company at that time looking for ways to make it grow. It was another, creative marketplace but different.
It was a talent marketplace. And one of the things that a lot of people needed was visuals. And we thought, hey, this is a creative way to market our, you know, marketplace, and it's a way of maybe keeping people coming back as we develop our actual core company. So, yeah, we made unsplash in an afternoon. We were very familiar with the problems. My background is as a designer. Luke was a designer as well, and we just kept seeing, like, how do you find these great photos?
Like, there is companies who would find this great stuff, like, path, you know, the social network mobile app. They had great photos all the time. Like, where are they finding this stuff We can't find anything that's nice that we know that we can use for sure. And I bet a lot of other people are having this problem. So let's make the thing that we wish would exist. And how did you start?
So it was a Tumblr blog with 10 images that we had left over from a photo shoot for the first version of that, our other company's website. And we said, this is an opportunity to try and make that thing. Let's timebox it because we're focused on another company, we'll minimize the risk with it. We'll see what we can do and see if we can create something that people would come back to regularly. And how did you timebox it? What did you give yourself? A day.
So we said if you can do this, aim to do it in the next in the afternoon, something ridiculous. You know? It put these constraints where you didn't have time to make anything custom. We just took the 10 images, used public Dropbox links, use a tumbler theme for $19 registered the unsplash.com domain for $9. So this whole thing was, you know, built for under 50 bucks. And put it on hacker news.
It was the only place we put it because we were so embarrassed by that first version, and we just sort of didn't look at it. And then photographer we worked with on that said, Hey, I'm getting all these messages on my portfolio site. Where did you guys put that? What happened? And we went tacker news, and it was number 1. There was 30,000 sign ups right away within those first couple hours. We're doing it all with a Google sign up form.
We actually hit the maximum limit of rows that you can do in a Google Pete. So we sort of knew that they were sort of hitting on a cord with this. And it was also, it was limited to just ten photos. Like, we had 10 photos, and so we uploaded those, and those were the first ten photos. But one of the things Michael did was he said, you know, 10 photos, 10 every 10 days. So we didn't have 10 more photos.
And I think that shows you, like, how little thought we'd put into in terms of expecting it to go somewhere, but we put it out there. And we were like, you know, if in 10 days, we need to find 10 more photos, we're gonna figure out some way to do it. Got it. So you gave yourself 10 more days by saying we're gonna do 10 photos every 10 days, and they said, okay. Wait. Now I have 9 days left to go find 10 more good photo. Exactly. The the classic punt So you time pounded yourself.
You made it about the timing. Like, what can I get done in 10 days? Not I have this great vision of this giant thing I'm gonna Beller. And now let me go build it. You just said, what can I get done in the next 10 days? Yeah. And I think there was some thought to a mechanic of You know, that solved 2 purposes. 1, we didn't have access to, like, content like this. There wasn't a ton of it. We had we made a new license this Pete said, let's just make it totally open as open as possible.
We couldn't find enough good stuff. So let's start it with our own. We'll be the ones to Pete up the first images, and we can probably keep up with 10 images every 10 days. And we knew a side effect of that was people would actually it would give them a reason to come back. So every 10 days, you would see the 10 new images, or you could subscribe by email. And so we ended up having, it's like 80% open rate email because that we would send the images by email every 10 days as well.
So it ended up being this really interesting way to grow at the beginning too. And then did you say to Pete, please submit your photos and we'll pick the 10 best and then send them out to the whole community? That's right. Yeah. So we added a submit photo Flint. I think we had maybe 12 words total on that Tumblr log page. Submit a photo was 1. And within that 2nd week when we were posting. So the 2nd 10 days, we were fortunate to have at least 10 good new photos that were submitted by people.
You guys are in Montreal. It's just the 2 of you. You've been working on this other business wasn't going anywhere. You get this huge demand from Pete, and then here you go. What next? We had 4 of us at the time. So we're 4 co founders. We started to see taking off. Not even really, like, after those 1st 2 days, when it sort of blew up, we just left it and came back into, you know, Mailchimp, our email provider, to see the next 10 days, and it had doubled.
They were like, wow, this is growing even faster than the core business, but we understand the purpose of it. It's doing what it needs to do. It's the number one referral source now for our company. So we'll keep running it like that. But what happened after a year, it grew even more to the point where we actually had to take it off tumbler because there was so much traffic.
And we needed to make decisions then because now we're going to be supporting a hosting bill and the traction it was getting. It was being used for more than the original use cases that were super relevant for our original businesses customers. It was moving into whole other markets. And so that's when we actually had the first conversations about splitting the 2 companies. That's fascinating. So the 1st year, you're still in the mindset that the old business is still worth doing.
Yeah. Eventually, it became this feeling of almost like you have two hands in blackjack sitting to each other. One is, you know, 16 and the other is a 20, and you only have this number of chips and you have to put them somewhere. We had raised funding for the other business, and that's when we made the decision. You know, we need to push this all into one spot. Interesting. And you had raised money from who? BDC Venture Capital And Founder Fuel.
So we had raised BDC Real Ventures as a major Canadian funds. We had done a series a investment that was led by at time was called Atlas Ventures. So Fred Destin and Ryan Moore, which eventually has now been rebranded to accomplice and Boldstar Venture Capital Those were the the main people on that first round. Got it. How much money did we have at that time? We probably had, like, 8,000,000.
When we first made On splash, we were on, like, 6 months left worth of our seed money, which was, like, 400 k. So I think we had maybe 150 k. Of that left. Yeah. That's why we're trying to be really creative with the way we grow. And then after unsplash about 6 months later is when we raise the $2,000,000 Beller a. And how how did you make that decision and who is involved in the discussions about do you go with the old business or do you go with this new photos related business?
Ryan from accomplices on the board. So we involved him in that discussion. When we saw what was happening, everyone's on this hunt for product market fit and what that looks like, what it feels like. I think we had the, actually, the benefit of having 2 companies at the same time and being able to see the difference. So what I felt with unsplash was we could stop doing everything on the Pete, and it would still grow.
We just couldn't fathom this thing that just kept growing no matter what we did. We could probably even do things to harm it, and it would still grow. Right. So you had product market fit with both businesses, but you can see the difference between having tremendous product market fit and just regular product market fit. Right. And I would say we were still even a bit on the hunt for a product market fit in the core business. Do you have to make the decision, what, 2014, 15?
2014 is when we first thought of making the decision, but we didn't really, like, finalize that decision until sort of the end of 2015, early 2016. That's also fascinating. I mean, for all the founders who are listening, it's like in retrospect, you know, they've got this great, growing horizontal platform for the whole internet that everyone was so excited about, but at the time, it's not clear.
There's art of you that wants to stick with the old business as part of commitments that you've made to your employees that, you know, you're gonna be doing X type of a business, not y type of a business. You've got investors you've told things too. You've you know, you got relationships outside of work that you've told what you're doing and who you are and to move off of that, to change your identity into being something different. It's actually a difficult decision for many Pete. Right?
Yeah. I think that was Luke, you can probably speak to this. That was one of the most probably the most difficult time period that we've had. Through all of this. Even though our company almost died maybe 3, 4 James. This time period was probably the hardest. Yeah. Absolutely.
And it's one of those things where when you're building a company, you go through a lot of steps where you think you know what product market fit is and then you get to another level and then you hit like a growth hurdle, essentially. You kind of see things either flattening out a bit, but it can be really tempting at that point to jump on to another project and be like, you know, let's work on this thing because it's right at the start of it and it's growing.
And the problems are so fresh and they're so kind of obvious and easy to solve. It's really an internal battle of like, do you stick with this thing just because it's gotten hard, but you're so close to breaking through to another level. And that was where we were with our core business, we felt it's really difficult because you don't know, and you don't have the ability to look back to have the hindsight that we have now of, like, this is such a massive Morgan.
And, is where it's gonna go and it's gonna continue on that trajectory. Right. You don't wanna deceive yourself into thinking that the new thing, because it's sparkly and shiny, you haven't the hurdles yet is any better than the thing that you're working on. And just remind us what the core business was again. Yeah. It was a marketplace for matching high quality design and creative talent with high quality projects.
So it was automating all the crap that gets in the way of the creative process, and you only focus on the creative work and let's connect people and make that be the whole thing and have it be the end result is great work. So a labor marketplace for creatives And now it's a photo marketplace for creatives. Got it. Okay. So that was a hard back and forth. Was it hard between the two of you? Was it hard with your other co founders? How was it hard?
I think we with the co founders, it was super helpful. I think this is one of the most important things that that I really learned. Like, if you solve for 2 things, in your company. I think you can solve for pretty much everything. 1 is the people you work with, and especially the people you found the company with, and the second how good your idea and then eventually your execution of that idea. If you hit on those 2 things, I think a lot of other things fall into place.
And so when you run into something like this, we had so much support. Like, we're all just thinking and trying to put the best idea. There wasn't a lot of ego attached to different things. I remember I think one of the most important things that we did in that process to finally make the call. 1 of our co founders, he pointed out in a meeting. I remember him saying it to me. We've said we're gonna do these things.
We Pete talking about, you know, how we think we can the core business to grow for the next couple of quarters. And he's like, can I really believe this? And he said, but I think we should look back at each quarter in the past And we've said similar things like this and how they turned up. And I think that's an important thing. I think we should put a stake in the ground at a certain point where we say that think these things are gonna happen, did they actually happen again?
Are we fooling ourselves for the 4th, 5th, 6th time? I think that was a really valuable exercise, and that's been something that we've even carried into on splash. You know, if we're working on something new and challenging, we put these stakes in the ground to evaluate to put our heads up and look. Here's here's what we said we were gonna do. How did that turn out? How were those decisions? Yeah. Because you're always, like, 2 months away from solving the next problem, essentially.
And that's oftentimes not the case. But if you actually, you know, if you send yourself calendar invites for, like, in 2 months or something and you say I expect to have done X Y And Zed, and you haven't done that, it really, you know, makes you reflect on where you're at. Right. And so, again, your time bounding things, you're saying, did we get there? Am I pushing the rock uphill on this side. And over here, the rock is running downhill. Got it.
Okay. So when you said it was a hard time, it wasn't that hard because you had each other. You had 2 good ideas, not one good idea. But it still felt hard because you were afraid of making the wrong decision. I think it was that plus, like, we had investors, you know, and investors are all in on what we've got with that first idea. They are also very interested in on Splash, but when you come to sort of saying we're gonna split these 2, there's different of what's gonna happen.
Are you gonna sell this and make sure that we're making a gain on that? And then are we moving everything into this next one? Also, we're, Canadian company, and there was a bunch of stuff written about. It's actually very easy to do sort of spin outs in the US. Very difficult to do them in Canada. So we were just trying to even figure out the mechanic of doing that deal. And I think, yeah, the hardest part was those tough conversations of what are we gonna do with both businesses?
With the capital that we have and how all the stakeholders thought about those things. Everyone had different opinions. A lot of different opinions. Course. And if you think about the investors also, they are 2 quite different companies. The types of investors you would get to invest in a creative marketplace are quite different than the kind of hybrid marketplace consumer product that on Splash is.
And so you're gonna have different kind of appetites for that risk those people are still your investors, and so you have to convince them and get them on board with it. So there was definitely a certain amount of challenges there. And so how did it resolve? We made the decision with the board with our major investors. We all had a conversation to do the spin out. What that meant is, we're gonna take the capital, put that towards unsplash.
We had a portion of capital that we were gonna put or it's the core business to get it to profitability. We're very close to being profitable. We also split the team. So we had team members who were fully on crew cruise what the original business was called. And we had a very small team that was starting to crop up around unsplash. So Luke was core number 1 on it, And then we had 2 or 3 that were coming, and we were gonna move a couple folks over to splash from crew.
So at the time, I think the split was, like, 73. Right, Luke? Something like that. Something like that. Right. Yeah. We had to reduce the team sizes as well. So I think in total, we had, like, thirty people at the time. So we had to make some team cuts, which was really difficult. We had to split those teams. And after all that, I mean, we made a lot of hard decisions very quickly. I think that was really important. We didn't let stuff like draw out.
Once we made the decision, everything was done within, like, a month. That's interesting that more people went over to the crew labor marketplace business and most of the money went over to the new high potential. Right. But that each company ended up with the same cap table because the investors kept their same shares, and you kept your same shares in both. And did you guys go off and run one company and then the other 2 co founders went to run the other? I was between both.
Luke was on on splash fully. My other co founders, we had 1 on 1 fully each. And then 2 of us were splitting. So we have 4 co founders. 2 of us were splitting, and we had one on 1 on each. So if this is 2016 4 years ago, then what happened? So crew, we had some interest from folks who wanted to actually buy the company. So once they sort of heard the news of the spin out, the push towards profitability.
There was an opportunity to actually make it the part of another company in that sort of situation. It wasn't necessarily it didn't have all this venture capital anymore, different needs, and different opportunities. So we actually had a partner that was going with, we were in talks with dribble, the online design community. I didn't know this, but dribble had just been acquired by Tiny and Andrew Wilkinson is the founder of that. I wrote him because I'm like, hey.
We just did this thing, which did a spin out. We're thinking about different ways to do things. I know you've a lot of different business at the same time. Have you thought about this? And, like, well, by the way, I don't know if you know this, but I just bought dribble, and I think dribble could buy crude. It was Morgan, interesting thing that happened. Within a couple of months, we ended up closing that transaction.
Crew became part of trouble, and then this crew team became Drbul Pro, which was rolled out, like, a year and a half ago. Okay. And then so you've got the smaller team working on unsplash. Yes. We had 3,000,000 of capital. We knew, you know, that the growth was there, but there's some challenges now. So at the time, know, we had evaluation, you know, that was on the previous company that now there's sort of like, what do we do with this next round?
Like, where's the 3,000,000 gonna get Are we gonna be raising a $2,000,000 round, $5,000,000 around, $10,000,000 round? So there's that interesting dynamic. We basically have a year to do this. What do we need to prove and how can we do that? Within a year. So that whole year was we also needed to set the story and the vision of the company because, like, James, as we've been speaking, a lot of how un splashed started was more around just like pure utility that we saw for ourselves.
We weren't necessarily, like, looking externally at the strategy and vision. So we spent a lot of time on thinking through that because we knew that there was gonna be an imminent fundraise. And I remember the Lucie, remember sort of the energy, we had to basically go from, you know, you're grinding it out in a labor marketplace for 3, 4 years, and now you're immediately hopping into a fundraise or another company. That's what that 1st year really felt like at unsplash.
So you're kinda tired at that point. Yeah. We were pretty tired. I think, Luke, you were you were in a good spot. I was excited. Yeah. Yeah. Like, if you finally got the resources and focus. Yeah. I remember that was a moment where it's like, you're on the last couple miles of the marathon and you need to just pick it up. This is one of those moments where you just have to do the work and close. And I remember how was the mentality that I had because I knew that I was gonna lead the fundraise.
What was the business model in your mind at that time? And then what did you need to prove during that year? Because I was a sole person who was most on unsplash you know, it was the thing that I spent all my time thinking about. I had a lot more time to think about it. And so, really, we were seeing massive, massive growth in terms of the ability to put an image anywhere on the Internet.
We Pete going from, you know, 1,000,000,000 views on images up to 10,000,000,000 views on images, like, very, very quickly. And we built out essentially this network of API integrations inside of all these creative apps. And when we thought about that, where that was going and how people needed access to images, you know, in this distributed environment. And all the different kind of new use cases that were coming out meant that we had to think of a different business model.
We weren't gonna do something where it was gonna be a premium you know, upsell or, you know, charge for images or something. We wanted to do something that would last, you know, for 5 to 10 years, not something that would work for 2 years. And so the thing that we looked at was let's grow this thing and continue growing the audience and make that really large. And in the back of our mind, we had this idea that we could build an ad model based on that.
But this was very, like, you know, compared to where we're at now, this was very early on, and we just had this kind of understanding. If you build it big enough, there'll be something you can do with So you're feeling at the time with guys. Let's just make this thing huge and have it touch everybody and touch everything, and we will figure out an ad model on this later. Basically. Yeah. Yep. That was the idea. And so during that 1st year, what did you feel like you needed to prove?
I mean, there was a whole bunch of questions at each step of unsplash, there's always been naysayers who basically say, you can't get to that next step. And so, you know, unsplash started off with our own photos, and then it was, you know, you can't get anybody else to submit this thing. And then we did start getting people to submit, but they were only certain types of photos. And so we kept knocking down these different barriers of, okay, let's get people to submit these types photos.
We had to prove out again that on the library side that we could cover all the different visual use cases. So we had to build out the product mechanisms, supply and getting all the different types of contributors motivated so that we could build a really, like, good flywheel there. And so we're working on that and we're like, we need to have that really boarded up.
The other piece was that we needed to really, again, show that the market was significantly larger than it had been with, you know, Getty images or shutter software, these kind of traditional professional creators. You know, we were seeing this in our data that there was a lot of people using images and basically everybody James use images.
And so we really need to actually have data points there to show that the potential market of people who need images is a hundred times the size of what is traditionally being there. So really, yeah, we were focused on collecting that data and also then growing. Obviously, just growth was the number one thing for us. Got it. And what were some of the breakthroughs that you had during that year?
I mean, you'd talked about, you know, changing the sort of regulatory situation or the licensing, if you will. There was a whole bunch of different hurdles that we had to kind of knock down. So there was the whole licensing legal area, and it sounds really easy to be like, oh, just create a license and give the thing away for free.
But laws across all the different countries are so complex and kind of crafting that all into Pete of terms and making it, at the same time, something simple that a regular person can understand because if you ask people, you know, the difference between royalty, free images, free images, you know, the different, you know, cc creative commons licenses, you know, attribution, no attribution, all those different things. It just gets confusing as we're trying to solve on the legal side.
We're trying to solve on the API partnerships side. So, our, one of our co founders now has spent the last 3, 4 years closing some of the biggest creative apps. And at the time, we didn't have really any major creative apps using us. And so we're really pushing there to build out an API that was easy to use, get it into all these different products. And there was just a whole host of kind of general growth things. You know, SEO was a huge part of how we grew.
Getting the product out there is really hard because actually a kind of interesting, like, flip side to the psychology where when you find something really good, you sometimes don't wanna share it. And so it was this thing where, like, people would find on spot kind of keep it as their own secret when necessarily wanna share it with all their friends so that they could use images.
So getting in front of, you know, search terms and really trying to create these discovery mechanisms Pete people realizing that on splash existed was was huge. Interesting. So anti word-of-mouth virality, and so STO is really critical to to busting through on that. And now I understand that, sort of a photo feature on unsplash has seen more than a photo on any other platform. Is that right? More than Instagram, more than the front page of New York James. Yeah. That's right. It's amazing.
Regular. So you've also said that filmmakers distribute trailers for free on YouTube to sell a movie and musicians release free songs or entire albums on SoundCloud to sell concert tickets. Officers give free chapters and 4000 of unpaid hours Flint blogs to sell a book. I mean, is that what's happening here? Yeah. It's very similar to what's happening here. I think what's happening in general on the internet is an evolution to visual storytelling via text to spend there for a while.
But the original way that even humans communicated was drawings and visuals. The cave wall didn't scale that well. So then you you started to have language, right, so you could vocalize and things spread faster. And the internet was good with text, but what's happened with improving bandwidth and quality of the internet just like becoming all visual, and we that's much more communicative and much more rich of a medium.
So for us, that's what we've seen as a big sort of tailwind that's been pushing on splash forward. Taught me a little bit about the psychology here. Why are people someone had told you 3 years ago, you can't get people to upload these photos. Yet you now have 200,000 people who have uploaded over 2,000,000 supremely high quality photos. What's going on with, you know, with the social proof or the social payoff people are getting? Cause they're not getting paid a ton of money for it, are they?
Yeah. The exchange is all free. Right? So it's a new, what we call, is a new social compact. Like, what's happening is the exchanges in social capital, the exchanges in being seen. And what's happened, I think the image is more powerful than ever, but it's more harder to be seen than ever. The saturation, right, I think I saw something where it's like 95,000,000 posts a day on Instagram. And it's like, how do you stand out in any of that?
The majority of people just have an audience of the friends and family and to break through that requires an immense amount of effort. What Unspash does for people is it allows you to be seen. And specifically, what's going on in photography and then what we look at is creative industries. They all evolve that sort different James, and they're all in different places. Where photography is, it's sort of evolved to the spot where the camera has become so good.
We all have professional level cameras in our and that has changed the supply dynamics. The way people are using images has totally changed. So that has just created a totally different economic range around this and what's happening. So to put images for free, it's actually creating a downstream effect. You remove the light since you allow people to use the image, it's now even more beneficial than just entertainment. Most of what all the image platforms are is entertainment.
What unsplash does is it also attaches utility. And when you attach utility, it creates sort of this outsized viewership that's happens on an image. And that viewership leads to downstream benefits. So the best way to do well in photography is to book custom gigs. And so what you're doing is you're leveraging almost like, you know, a developer would leverage an open source project to, you know, some company is gonna see that on GitHub say this is a really great project. We wanna hire you.
A similar thing is happening with on Splash where people see that work that you're doing, and they're able to connect and hire you for that custom work is really where a lot of the value sits in the photography. Got it. So that's why people are sharing. They're sharing their stuff because they wanna be seen and because it also is sort of the top of the funnel for some sort of high margin payout that they will get later once they are seen and once they are known. Right.
And there's a bit of a pie that happens here too. So that's that's one reason. There's what we've noticed with our contributors is it's not just one reason. It's sort of a pie of maybe 2 or 3 reasons. Another reason is to feel a part of something. And that's what internet communities do for a lot of people. You know, you feel like you're contributing to something Beller.
So a bit of a Wikipedia effect know, Wikipedia, you really don't get any, like, I don't doubt any of us can name a username on Wikipedia, but we all use and see all these entries that people are putting And then there's also actually a reciprocity factor that's happening. So most of the people who are contributing images, they actually start as people who are downloading images. So they're downloading and using the Pete, and they're saying, how do I get back to this?
Well, you know, I have a few images. I can contribute and help build this library. And is that maybe social context, that community context? Is that maybe helping people when they take a picture from on splash and they use it on Instagram, they will often cite the person who took the photo and give them credit. Correct. Yeah. That happens Most of the time, there's a behavior that a lot of people have done for many years. It's crediting image use.
And I think people do it as it's like the least I can do. I found so much value from this. It's not money. You know, everyone keeps talking about money. I mean, even in the context of Facebook, quote unquote, ruining democracy or something, they saw, they're to do it for the money. They're not. They just wanna win, right, that's not about the money. And in this case, we're also seeing the same thing. The motivation isn't necessarily money. It's more social cap.
Have you thought about how to codified that social capital. You measure it. A lot of these social networks have done something simple like path that you mentioned earlier. You know, they said, look. If we can get, you know, people to connect to someone, and they're a member for life. Facebook said if I get 10 people to connect to Facebook, you know, so they've put some metrics around the density of their network and what causes it to sort of tip.
Have you done that with social capital at this point? The big thing for us that we've seen, we haven't necessarily used that to, you know, accelerate the number of contributions, but we are intentional with what we build into the product to help show those things to help a contributor who wants to see what's happening. That's the whole purpose of, you know, why are they contributing to UnSpash. So we started with views. Views and download counts.
Like, that was sort of the original thing kind of primitive, but that was already a natural comparison then that people would do. So you say, this is how many views I'm getting on on splash. This is how many views I'm getting on Instagram. This is how many views I would get if I just kept it in my folder doing nothing. You know, it's like blowing away. It's not even close. Hundred times 10,011,000 times what you're getting anywhere else.
You're seeing sort of a comparison there, and then there's sort of this next level. So you start contributing into Morgan eventually these kind of become numb unless opportunities happen from them. So if you look at address comparisons YouTube. You reach certain numbers of views. Things start happening to you. Right? So it's like, I don't know what the number is, but let's say you hit 10,000,000 views, that's when you get your call from Ellen, the generous.
That's like it levels up as you go along with unsplash that also tends to happen, but we're trying to show them inside of their stats a bit Morgan they don't just have to hope for these these to happen. So downloads was another thing. And inside of download, you can start to see where your images are being used. So I think that's big for people who, one of the purposes of why they contribute is to be a part of this creative community. So how am I moving creativity forward?
Show me you know, views views are great for me versus where I do other things, but now I moved on to my next level. Like, what impact am I making the download account was good, but the next level of that was, like, showing where they all are. And we recently released that. And eventually, we'll be able to get smarter around this. Like, when people reach certain levels, we see certain contributions that start to happen in people submitting more images.
That just hasn't really been the priority number 1 problem for us right now. Right. To sort of gamify it even further. What's interesting, it sounds a bit like a business intelligence platform where you're getting report on how your business is doing, but in this case, it's not a business with money. It's, again, the social capital, not the capital capital. Yeah. We even released messaging before we like, the download uses because we wanted to accelerate the opportunities happening for people.
Got it. So can you run a business on social capital? And if so, how long does it last? I believe you can run a business on social capital. It depends on the conversion. Right? So I think a lot of actually people start most careers. It's just been done in different ways with social capital. Right? Like, we've all look at everyone's first job. The real job that they wanted, they probably did a whole bunch of stuff for free. Now that, like, free money, but they spent their time.
And to me, time is sort of that equation that fits into social capital. You're doing something and it's You know, that's not an immediate, like, dollar dollar exchange that's happening, but it's actually for a bigger thing that you see happening in the future. It's in service of a bigger thing that you see coming down the line. I think that's what a lot of our contributors use on Splash for. This is in service.
See, I'm gonna post images here because it's in service of something bigger when it comes. And I think blogging has similar things with that. Blogging, you are contributing there. You don't know exactly who's gonna read this, where it's, but it's gonna live online public for people to see, and you believe some downstream benefits are gonna come from that.
First, it's just holding those ideas in and they're essentially, like, waste And and what have you said to people on your product that gives them a sense that they're part of something bigger that gives them a sense that they're part of this tribe? I think we've gotten very intentional about our onboarding for people who submit images. So at the beginning, when you would submit an image, it'll kinda go into, like, an abyss Like, you had, like, the drop, the photo, and cool.
We'll get back to you if it fits in the 10 every 10 days. But now you submit a photo, even whether we review all the images, And even if it isn't selected, whatever it is, is second you submit a photo, you're getting an email back talking about the community, like now. What is this? What is this thing that you just submitted a photo to? So we talk about it. We say, unsplash is this. You know, this is what it means to participate and submit images. This is the impact that we've seen happen.
You can actually join and communicate with other members here. You can join and communicate with team here. This is what we believe. So it's almost as if, you know, when you're onboarding a new employee, it's like the same thing. We're talking to Pete, like, they're now part of something, and this is what it needs to be part of that. And so you lead with the y. You lead with the community. You lead with the people and the meaning rather than you're gonna get x for y. Right.
And even the language, we're very sparse on language on the tire site, but on the home page, you'll see powered by creators, you know, unsplash is this, but it's powered by creators because we want people to know that this is not just us scraping images You know, this is people who are submitting these things. There's people behind the scenes making this happen. You do have investors. You are a for profit. Company. And so how are you making money today? How has the advertising model evolved?
The scale that we've reached now, so we do 20,000,000,000 image views a month. The site's still growing a ton. And what we see is that ability to get image distribution for any photo we can do that for any brand. And we're doing this not in a way that it's like every other advertising platform. You know, it's like Facebook and Google and everybody else who's building something. Usually, what they try to do is that, hey.
We're gonna, you know, target people better and, you know, we'll Pete your CPC down and you can do that and we'll convert that That's not how we're looking at this. What on Splash is doing is we're changing people's minds and how you think about your product. So this is what TV and emotional sort of advertising has done for a lot of brands, and it's why a lot of money is still put into TV. I believe it's Morgan TV than still is in Facebook.
Google is not growing a lot, but it's still sitting in there because brands, they know this impact of changing people's minds and emotions. And so what unsplash does is you're taking your branded visuals. You put them on unsplash. You have them rank on the top of relevant searches. Give you an example, we work with Harley Davidson. They want to be synonymous with motorcycles, but they also want to be synonymous with bigger categories like travel or adventure and freedom.
These things that people resonate with the brand. When you put your images on unsplash, yes, you get in front of this, like, great creator audience, but it's really about reaching the entire internet through those creators. So you're gonna go reach these pockets of audiences that you can't reach with any traditional digital advertising. Because these creators are choosing these branded visuals. They're taking them by choice and putting them in front of their audience.
So if I'm a blogger and I'm gonna write something about, you know, what would you do with complete freedom, and I search freedom on unsplash Harley Davidson images shows on top. And I use that. I'm now putting that in front of my audience in the best visual real estate. You know, it's not sitting at the outskirts where we've all, like, starting to ignore that. We're blocking ads. It's actually relevant, and it's part of that content. Right.
And that influencer has a trusted relationship with their viewership, and so that's a really wonderful place for Harley Davidson to have their ad. That's right. It's an evolution on what we've been seeing with influencers. Right? Like, but when an influencer keeps posting this branded content, they lose trust. Every time they're doing that, they're losing trust a little bit because we all know they're getting paid.
And so we don't really trust what happens with UnSpash, because that creator is using that image by choice and putting it in front of their audience, that is completely different. So they're saying this image is useful to me, and I'm gonna go and put it over here to help me tell my story. And that keeps all of the trust on. Got it. The creators don't get paid more to do Harley Davidson to include Harley Davidson branded photos at all. That's not part of the deal.
Yeah. There's interesting mechanics that are happening. So brands have an option. They can either submit images that they've already got. You know, a lot of these brands have run marketing campaigns. They've got images and folders. They can submit those sun splash and, or they can actually hire unsplash photographers and they do that through us. About half the brands we've worked with have hired the photographers. So what's happening there is another loop, and this was unexpected.
We knew that people wanted to get in contact with photographers, but we didn't think at this level of scale. So now you're working with some of the greatest brands in the world. Who these photographers would love to be doing work with, and we now have access to making those relationships and those opportunities happen. So you're going back to the business of crew. Yeah. It's a lot easier with photography than it is software design and development projects.
And if I'm a creator and a or a photographer and I've uploaded a 100 images, how much am I getting paid? Not that much. Right? Yeah. You're not getting paid to submit those images, but What you're looking for is, you know, either that build in social capital that leads to a downstream opportunity or you're just looking to, you know, be a part of this because you're getting value by using the images freely. And so you're sort of saying, hey. I'm gonna come back and give images.
Now in the case that you get hired by a brand, that's yeah, you're making significant cash on that. And what's your thesis generally about the future of advertising? Yeah. I think the way we see it is that there's you know, there's been a shift in terms of Facebook and Google taking over all of the direct advertising. They're great platforms. There's no doubt about it that Google and Facebook have built the best direct response advertising platforms.
But there's still a ton of money tied up in TV and specifically in brand advertising. And that's a completely different behavior and need than direct response. Like, direct response is the idea of, like, click on this to get or why. And that's all based on interruption advertising as Beller was saying before. But what really happens in brand is you're trying to create this aspiration or influencer perception.
And the way that you go about doing that, you can do on Facebook and Google, but they're really not built for that. If you think about how they're being presented inside these platforms, They're just not conducive to the idea of being highly aspirational or really influential. And so we looked at TV and we know that images are super powerful. What we've seen is that we can put these images across the internet at a unparalleled scale.
So if you think about hotspot is supplying the dominant platform for spying images to the internet. So if you can then take a percentage of that and shift it towards your brand, you can then change across all these different mediums multiple times a day, you're gonna go and see these images, and they're gonna subtly influence you to understand something about that brand. And so we're really trying to build something that's focused on impact and not necessarily on targeting.
And that's what you'll see with Facebook and Google. They're all about optimizing and highly targeting. But because these views that are generated are so massive and they're, right across the internet, we're able to get across a much larger audience, but with less targeting.
But that's actually really important to shifting a kind of global understanding of a brand because if you buy Nike, you're saying you not only have your own of Nike, but you wanna make sure that somebody else who sees you has that same perception of Nike. And so what brands are really trying to do is they're really trying to influence massive numbers of people and that traditionally is being done by TV.
And unsplash is this way to do it digitally on the internet, and that's something that we're building towards. Well, guys, I think fascinating, and I just wanna thank you for coming on to the Netflix podcast, the psychology, and the sharing, and the platforming, and and whatnot is just such a great antidote to the, sort of, coin operated vending machine mentality that's invading Silicon Valley right now because of all the money.
Then the way you guys are thinking about it is, like, the way we thought about things 20 years ago. And, I think it ends up producing the most impactful things. So thank you for for taking that approach. I think that all the founders out there are gonna really enjoy this. Thanks, man. Yeah. Thank you for doing this. You've been listening to the NFX podcast.
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