Over the years, New York City-based Pond5 has grown its marketplace for finding video, photos, and other media pretty dramatically. But now that it has reached critical mass, it can be difficult to sort through all the millions of pieces of content to find what you want. To improve on that, the company has just launched a bold new redesign aimed at providing a more visual experience, while also improving search and navigation.
Pond5 launched in 2006 as a marketplace for video producers to make their clips available to third parties. That would allow virtually anyone to license video — i.e., b roll — to round out their own video productions. While it had a fair amount of success with video, the company has sought to allow licensing of other types of content as well. Since then, Pond5 has expanded from just offering video to also include stock photography, audio files, and even visual effects.
Compared to other comparable platforms, Pond5 has a straightforward pitch to creators: It offers a 50 percent split for all media that is licensed on its site, which is a pretty attractive rate. It also enables creators to set their own prices and licensing terms, giving them more freedom than most other licensing sites. As a result, it’s gotten more than 1.5 million video clips over the years and 10 million stock photos, which in turn has attracted more than 100,000 paying customers.
But with all the content it has, finding media can be a problem. That’s why Pond5 just launched a beautiful new site with improved search and navigation, as well as new artist pages and larger thumbnails and previews. The new design is Pond5’s first major revision to its site in years, and is focused on providing a more visual experience to customers.
That’s guided first and foremost by bigger thumbnails and previews to appeal to potential customers. In the case of video and audio, the new design allows for instant playback directly from search pages, allowing users to scrub through and check out that media instantly. It also has infinite scroll, providing a faster-loading, more responsive design.
It also improves users ability to find what they’re looking for and to make purchases. The site has improved search with more granular filters for media type, resolution, and aspect ratio, among other fields. The site now also allows customers to build “collections,” to organize the media they might want to purchase or work with. The new site also has a neat drag and drop feature that allows users to click on content and easily add it to their cart or collections. For artists and creators, the new design has more customizable pages. That will allow them to create more visually appealing and differentiated portfolios of content.