PicApp launches embeddable news photography, may survive a year or so

I wanted to tell you about a company called PicApp. It’s been all over the blogoshere, so you may have heard of it. GigaOm wrote:

PicApp, a San Francisco-based company is offering copyright news and stock photos from large photo banks like Getty Images and Corbis for free. The company is likely to announce availability of its public beta service later today.

The photos are displayed in a flash media file and can be embedded on any web page, just like YouTube. PicApp makes money off contextual advertising it embeds in the photos, and in turn shares it with the photo agencies. The new service is a sign of how tough things are in the stock photography business, where new and low cost competitors are emerging thick and fast, and challenging the old dogs like Getty Images.

So I’m thinking: cool, embedding news pictures on my blog sounds like a great feature. I’d wanted to lighten up the blog with some photographic works, so I signed up for the service and wanted to let you know how that went.

1. First of all, there’s a long and involved registration process. Apparently, there’s no sharing of pictures unless you are registered. This seems to be a big difference with YouTube, where you can simply browse all the videos and simply pick the one you want
2. Then, PicApp is not supported by WordPress.org. So you won’t see a picture on this post for that reason. I didn’t find that out until I had registered, and saw PicApp only gave you a script for embedding pictures (WordPress.com doesn’t allow scripts).
3. I have a strong feeling from what I’ve seen on the site and from the embeddable script, PicApp pictures are going to be full of advertising slogans moving around, attracting attention and bothering innocent blog readers.
4. From what I could see, the quality of pictures is not spectacular. Check out flickr Creative Commons Search before you go to PicApp. That should probably work unless it’s very fresh news you’re blogging about.

In conclusion I’d say PicApp has a strong concept but poor implementation. They have seen Flickr, Youtube and the likes bleeding cash so they have focused a lot on revenue. I think that’s a mistake. Their three big problems (Requiring registration, Requiring embeddable scripts and the Advertising Model) are all prohibitive measures, negatively impacting ease of use. They will prevent PicApp from reaching critical mass.