Lobster adds Verizon Cloud to its AI-powered photo licensing arsenal

Lobster, a Startup Battlefield company from 2014, is breathing new life into its AI-powered media licensing platform by partnering with Verizon Cloud.

Advertisers, publications, agencies and the media will now have the means to license images sourced from social media and now, Verizon Cloud. For every image sold, 75% of the profit goes towards the contributor, ranging in skill from pro photographer to regular Instagrammer.

For regular users (you!), this means is that if you sign-up for Lobster and upload images to the service from your Verizon Cloud, you can proceed to license and sell them for profit. Lobster’s artificial intelligence engine kicks in by analyzing these images, building a neural network and enabling detailed search methods, thus enabling the discovery of your work.

It’s worth noting that image licensing fees are meant to affordable, so Lobster isn’t cut out to be a primary source of income, but instead a plausible way of making money while also protecting the copyright integrity of things you publish on social media.

unnamedIn practice, brands and advertisers contact regular social media users to license their content for advertisements or other creative materials, either via email or social media comment. From there, users can log-into a dashboard that allows them to manage their licensed images, accept offers and purchase images in turn.

Thus far, the company has integrated with many recognizable companies that manage large stores of media: Google Photos, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, VK and more recently, Dropbox.

By accessing the billions of images on the Verizon Cloud, produced by millions of users, the Lobster AI’s search and auto-tagging capabilities will improve, until Lobster adds another social media source to its catalog.