Lensy

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5th March 2014, Singapore – Lensy, is a new community marketplace for photography enthusiasts to feature and sell their images as stock photography to brands and businesses that need them.

Started by two ex-advertising agency planners, Vincent Teo and Ling Ang, Lensy was developed to help address the challenge of finding Asian photos from the traditional stock libraries, most of which were based in the U.S and Europe. At the same time, most current stock photography licenses are complicated and expensive for buyers with only a small percentage of revenue generated from each sale going back to the photographers.

“These were entrenched practices that were meant to benefit traditional stock libraries, not photographers. We wanted to find a way that could disrupt this outdated model and empower photographers by creating a fair and sustainable platform.” Vincent says.

With the lower cost of entry of cameras and better quality camera phones, there are more and more people in Asia who are interested in photography and who are good photographers themselves.

Lensy seeks to champion the photography enthusiast by giving an equal opportunity to anyone who has a passion for the craft to grow and develop as a photographer while making their photos available for sale to brands and businesses.

“There is an opportunity to democratize stock photography by offering photography enthusiasts the opportunity to earn money from their photos as well as offering businesses a wide range of affordable, high quality and royalty-free images that were free of complicated licenses for their web content such as websites and social media posts.” says Ling.

Lensy is based in Singapore but the site is open to serve a global audience with a specific focus on Asia. Anyone can sign up for free and upload his/her photos. All submitted photos will then be moderated by the team to ensure quality and appropriateness.

Under this model, all photos uploaded to Lensy are capped at 5MB are sold for $10 where half the amount sold ($5) goes to the photographer. The license gives buyers the non-exclusive right to use the photo royalty free across all mediums and over an indefinite period of time. And unlike other stock libraries, Lensy pays each photographer at the end of every month regardless of the sale amount due via Paypal.

Lensy also aims to make photography more social through Lensy Tasks where it allows businesses who require specific photos to crowdsource them from photographers via a “task”. Each task has a duration and reward attached. The winning photograph is selected at the end of the task to win the reward but all submissions that fit the theme will have the opportunity to be purchased by the brand; where each photo sale will earn the photographer $5.

Photographers can now register at https://lensy.com/ and start selling!