The archive · Small Business & Money · Marketing decision · 2013–2018
Unsplash: Crew's free-photo giveaway side project becomes a 48-billion-view platform
Crew posted leftover photoshoot images on a $19 Tumblr blog; the free-photos-every-10-days side project drew 5M visits to the marketplace and became Unsplash.
Unsplash · Crew
What it had to solve
Crew, a Montreal freelance marketplace, could not find a good homepage photo, so it hired a photographer; the shoot left a pile of unused images. The young company was almost out of money and desperate for traffic.
How it works
In 2013, Montreal startup Crew was building a marketplace where businesses hire freelancers, and it could not find a decent photo for its homepage. It hired a photographer, and the shoot produced far more images than one page needed.
Instead of deleting the leftovers, co-founder Mikael Cho picked 10 of them and posted them on a $19 Tumblr blog with public Dropbox links, under a '10 free photos every 10 days' promise. When the post hit Hacker News it went to number one within hours; the site crashed from traffic until Dropbox's engineering team upgraded the account for a day to keep it up.
The giveaway became Unsplash. Free photos with a link back to Crew pulled over 5 million visitors to the marketplace, passed one million downloads in the first year, and by early 2018 had reached 48 billion photo views and 310 million downloads. Crew was eventually sold to Dribbble while Unsplash continued on its own, raising a $7.25 million Series A in February 2018.
Why it lands
- The photos were already paid for, so giving them away cost almost nothing and converted dead assets into traffic.
- Free, useful content aimed at people who already buy stock photos reached an audience no banner ad could.
- The '10 photos every 10 days' promise created a reason to keep coming back and a steady flow of press.
- Every free download carried a link to Crew, turning strangers into marketplace visitors without a marketing budget.
What it did
Unsplash referred more than 5 million visitors to Crew's marketplace and passed a million downloads in its first year; by early 2018 it reported 48 billion photo views and 310 million downloads, and had raised a $7.25 million Series A.
What you can take
Give away surplus you already made: free, useful content aimed at people who already pay for that category can outperform paid acquisition, because every download carries a link back to you.
Since then
Crew was sold to Dribbble in 2017, and Unsplash became a standalone company. It kept growing as the default free stock-photo source for designers, with 10 photo downloads per second in 2018, and its open giveaway model pushed traditional stock agencies to rethink pricing. The side project that began as a $19 Tumblr blog became a category-defining platform.
Sources
- The Unsplash Formula: How Crew went from almost broke to getting 5 million visitors
- Unsplash raises $7.25M to bring cryptocurrency to its free, curated photo platform
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