Berlin-based photo agency, EyeEm, has reportedly filed for bankruptcy after failing to pay any fees to photographers for the entire year.
The company is both a stock agency and photo sharing social media app that was once hyped as a real competitor to Instagram. And for a brief period in 2012, the app was apparently more popular than Instagram in the Apple App store. Although the hype was short lived.
Business Insider Deutschland reported on April 4, 2023 that the company was ‘on the brink of collapse’. Here’s a translated excerpt of a report by Alex Hofman for Business Insider.
‘At the end of 2020, Eyeem restructured its team, the founders left their startup. Six months later, the shareholders sold the company to the listed Swiss investment company New Value, which has been trading as Talenthouse AG since the end of 2021. According to stock market documents, it paid 40 million US dollars (equivalent to 37 million euros) for Eyeem, but a few months later only valued the platform at a single-digit million amount.
‘Since the takeover, the Berlin company has been managed by several different CEOs and Managing Directors. According to the decision of the responsible district court to open insolvency proceedings, the company is currently without a leader. Most recently, photographers reported that payments for the sales of their works were slow or non-existent. The parent company Talenthouse also faced these allegations. Its stock market price has almost completely collapsed since a high in the summer of 2021.’
German photography blog, Alltag Eines Fotoproduzenten, by Robert Kneschke, previously speculated the situation was dire when he visited the EyeEm address and ‘only found a very over-crowded mailbox’, which included several visible yellow dunning notices.
EyeEm launched in 2011, and operated a popular stock photo marketplace and at once point had ‘tens of millions of users’. In 2015, US-based venture capital fund, Valar Ventures, backed by Paypal co-founder and billionaire, Peter Thiel, sunk US$15 million into EyeEm.
EyeEm had partnerships with big name stock agencies like Getty Images, Adobe Stock, and Alamy. Kneschke reports there are nine million EyeEm user images at Getty Images, and hopefully the administrator will distribute some owed payments to photographers.
I haven’t been paid since last year and have been trying to get my account deleted from the site, but it won’t let me because I have outstanding payments. With no one responding to my emails, this is a source of incredible frustration for me. What will happen to the website where people can still sign up unknowingly?
Hello, today I got an email and finally got the 20$ they were owing me since 2021. Hopefully they will distribute what they owe totally.