Oodls - the user-generated content marketplace

by Startacus Admin

Oodls, the Scottish startup that's "licensing great content from talented Instagrammers across the globe for businesses big and small."

Anyone who creates content on websites or blogs, or perhaps even posts a lot on social media, will understand how vital good stock photographs are. A good picture breaks up the wall of text, draws the viewer’s eye, enhances the words with evocative imagery...and makes articles look a bit longer. But the keyword is ‘good’.

That doesn’t just mean high resolution or touched up nicely to make the colours pop; it means something that looks real, authentic, familiar, relatable. We have written before about startups who are taking on the stock photo market from different angles, with the likes of Shuttout, UKBlackTech and, more tenuously, Serelay. Today, we are looking to Scotland for the next.

Edinburgh-based startup OODLS has a similar idea to Shuttout, in that they believe that people deserve the opportunity to be paid for the work they are sharing with the world, while simultaneously providing that real, authentic quality to stock photos.

Because they are real - they are photos taken by ordinary people who would have taken those photos anyway and uploaded them to Instagram. These are photos that were not taken with commercialisation in mind, but this doesn’t mean the photos can’t be beautiful - just a glance at the samples on OODLS’ home page confirms that.

OODLS is easy to use, simple to navigate, and clear in the usage of the imagery. You won’t need to worry about getting a letter from someone’s lawyer. Content creators set the price of their photos themselves, keep 100% of the license fee, and retain copyright. If you find an image you would like to use, but the resolution isn’t quite what you need, it may even be possible for OODLS’ AI to upscale it to 300dpi.

In early September, OODLS’ CEO and founder Sarah Stenhouse was one of those celebrated at a Women in Tech Scotland event in their hometown of Edinburgh. This followed receiving £243,000 in funding from Equity Gap, Gabriel, and the Scottish Investment Bank, who clearly see the value of this fresh take on the market.

As a platform that uses a lot of imagery in our articles, we are particularly interested to see a startup looking at stock photos through a different lens!

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• #photography
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• #instagram
• #creative
• #oodls

Published on: 15th September 2019