Why Atlantic Images are giving away their celebrity photo content for free

PAN EXCLUSIVE

This is an interesting move by celebrity photo agency Atlantic Images who launched on PAN in 2016 they are going the free images route with their content citing traditional usage and the decline in decent photo prices as the reason to try this new business model housed at Celebrity Wotnot.
You Tube and on-site advertising revenue will replace the fight to get decent usage fees from traditional media.
PAN spoke with Atlantic cofounder Chris Whittle yesterday to catch up on isolation survival tips and this new photo venture. Chris told us he feels he has ‘nothing to lose’ as his agency is small and nimble with very few overheads. Chris told us lots of today’s celebrity photo sets don’t even get published and the traditional photo agencies don’t push their archives where some superb content is always waiting to be viewed.

The Celebrity Wotnot archive kicks off with around 50,000 celebrity images dating back to 2006 including Chris’ own images, Atlantic Images and the archives of twelve other photographers who managed to extracted their archives from celebrity agency Splash News during the Corbis ownership years – extracting their material in 2015/16 just before Splash went to Silverhub. [Splash is now with Rcapital]
To use an image – you can just drag and drop to the Mac desktop and get publishing – ‘a link back to Celebrity Wotnot would be nice but not a condition’ says Chris – the image will carry an on-image logo for the site. There is a £25 per picture option if you do want to commercialise the image – just click the Buy button.

A good example of reach is the video uploaded to You Tube above – “With 4.3 million views and counting our video footage of the Royals Trip to Canada made us more revenue than any content we submitted to traditional publishers.”

Here’s how it works:

Great stuff ! No agency has been able to crack this free-for-advertising space yet and we are hoping this is the start of something that will!
PAN will be watching this new celebrity photo business model – we know from similar business owners in this field that keeping at the top of the You Tube and similar search results and go-too’s takes some serious work …and of course great contact!