Google, LIFE magazine drum up publicity with 10 million photos
By Matt Jansen
Google Image Search was once the bane of content publishers everywhere, they hated the fact that users could pull their images and repurpose them without any sort of compensation. Now the tables are turning as Google Image Search continues to grow in popularity as a way to location good imagery and related content. LIFE Magazine is embracing that shift by pumping 10 million new photos into it.
It’s a good signal from the publishing industry that they’re ready to embrace the web medium as a marketing platform to build their brand and attract the public’s goodwill. 10 million photos is a pretty big statement, and by choosing Google as it’s delivery partner, LIFE has insured that a very large audience will witness its gift.
The interesting part is how exclusive many of these photos seems to be, “only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints,” according to Google.
Right now about 20% of the collection is live but Google expects to have the rest live on its servers within the next couple of months! That’s a great testament to how efficient the search engine giant has become at digitizing content from various formats. In a way Google is becoming the world’s historian as it continues to delve deeper into libraries, newspapers, and magazines.
The other piece to this is a tie-in to transaction processing. After finding an image you like, it’s possible to order large prints from LIFE through Google’s interface. That could translate into a nice influx of cash for LIFE, and in an environment where lots of magazines are struggling to stay in front of consumers as a printed medium.
This will be interesting to watch. If LIFE succeeds in drawing in some significant revenue as well as benefitting from the good publicity there are sure to be many other magazines and publishers to follow.
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