You don’t have to have followed social media very closely in recent years to realize that videos now play a much more important role than photos. But where does all this material come from? Of course, there are also numerous amateur videographers who make their recordings available free of charge.
Unsplash’s big competitors Pixabay and Pexels opened their doors some time ago not only for images, but also videos. Later, they landed on numerous accounts on Instagram or TikTok, for example. So when will the biggest representative of free stock databases follow suit? Is it perhaps a conscious decision to focus so much on photos?
I checked with the head of the community, Annie Spratt. She has a clear answer for me when I ask her about videos: “Nothing planned at the moment – sorry!” When I ask whether they simply don’t have the capacity for it or perhaps don’t see videos as part of the platform’s mission, she reveals something else exciting:
It’s just that we are flat out working on something very big at the moment, and we will be focusing on that for the rest of 2022.
Other priorities is the only reason for now.
Unfortunately, it is not yet clear from this what it could be about and whether we will even see this big thing this year. It’s also possible that it won’t be until 2023. Based on what’s happened in the last few years, it’s quite possible that the goal is to give more creators the opportunity to make money from their photography – even though the pictures are still completely free to use, of course. But that’s how they’ve tried to match artists with brands or other clients in the past. The recently introduced PayPal button on the profile also falls into this line. Besides, I can think of a few more things that Unsplash could address, such as the terrible messaging system or the search function, which is in need of improvement.
What is your opinion? Are videos on Unsplash lacking or is everything fine the way it is? And what do you hope is the big thing they are working on?
(Header image: Jakob Owens)
