Screenshot of 500px for iPad (click to enlarge)

Updated. 500px, the photo-sharing website beloved by photography professionals and highly skilled hobbyists, debuted a new iPad app over the weekend. And at just three days old, the new app is already experiencing growth that’s downright jaw-dropping.

Here are some of the numbers relayed to me by 500px co-founder Evgeny Tchebotarev:

• Users flip through an average 80 photos per visit to 500px for iPad, spending 35 minutes in the app
• The iPad app now serves 50 percent of all traffic seen by 500px’s website
• The app is on track to serve more than 1 million flips on Monday alone
• 500px for iPad is currently the top free photo app in the Russian app store, #3 in Canada and #4 in the United States

As we wrote when we first covered the Toronto-based startup back in May, 500px is known for having a slick user interface that complements the kinds of artistic photos hosted on the site. It makes sense that 500px’s experience would work so well on a design-centric device like the iPad. Also, a lot of the folks who love 500px are the same kind of early adopting, gadget loving power users who have fully embraced the iPad — it’s a perfect overlap of user bases.

500px for iPad screenshot (click to enlarge)

500px’s growth spurt

Overall, 500px has hit its stride in recent months. The site has grown by over 20 times in the past year, and continues to grow more than 30 percent each month — right now, 500px fields 3.4 million unique visitors monthly. As of today there are more than 2.5 million artistic photos on the site that have garnered more than 55 million page views. In the beginning of this year 500px’s only employees were its co-founders, Tchebotarev (who is also known by his artistic pseudonym “Ian Sobolev”) and Oleg Gutsol. Now the company has 12 full-time employees and is keen to hire more developers.

But it’s taken a while to build up to 500px’s apparent overnight success. 500px was first established eight years ago as a community for photography buffs within LiveJournal, the pioneering social blogging website. Its current incarnation as a wider scale photo sharing site was launched nearly two years ago, in late October 2009.

A small company — for now

Update: Despite all the growth, 500px has thus far avoided taking any venture capital investment on millions in venture capital. The site’s main revenue source comes from $50 per year premium accounts; 500px also collects a 5 percent commission on prints of photos sold by users. “We are well into generating revenue that helps us support the growth and expansion, and have new interesting products in the pipeline,” Tchebotarev said, explaining why they have yet to take on more outside funding than its $525,000 Series A. But he added: “Obviously, we are open to discussions.” With the kind of growth the company has seen thus far, 500px may start fielding offers that are hard to refuse.

This post has been corrected to include 500px’s Series A venture capital funding information. 

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Enter Stipple, a San Francisco-based startup that wants to change the way online photo licensing works in a big way.

This week saw the launch of “Stipple Marketplace,” an image repository and licensing service that actually inverts the business model used by Getty and other similar services. Photographers and photo agencies upload their pictures to Stipple, which then allows brands to tag the photos with links to information about the products shown in the image. For instance, luxury shoe designer Christian Louboutin could tag a red carpet photo of Kim Kardashian in which she’s wearing a pair of Louboutin heels. Brands can then offer to pay a certain amount of money (such as 10 cents per click, up to $3000) to any publisher who will use the photo with the tags included. Stipple’s cut of the fee varies based on the size and scope of each deal.

Screenshot of Stipple Marketplace (click to enlarge)

“We’ve just flipped the business model. This is a way for publishers to earn money by publishing photos,” Stipple CEO Rey Flemming said in an interview this week. “We think we’ve built a system that aligns everyone’s interests, from photographers, to advertisers, and to publishers.”

Of course, this model is heavily dependent on brands’ willingness to pay up. Companies typically pay to have their products displayed in advertisements, not normal photos. More than 50 brands have signed up to use the new Marketplace system, and Stipple’s success ultimately depends on whether they and others like the service.

Stipple uses both technology and manpower to ensure brand information and other tags added to its photos are accurate. Unlike other photo tagging services like Luminate, which embeds in-photo links to products that are similar to what’s shown in an image, Stipple requires that tags link only to the exact product shown in a picture.

Stipple is going up against some stiff competition. Getty Images has dominated the industry for nearly 15 years, and publishers have been paying photographers or photo agencies to use their images since photography was invented. But I think it’s worth a try to shake up the business model and rebuild it in a way that makes sense for today’s digital world. Stipple Marketplace could well be the one to lead the change.

Camera image used under CC license by Flickr user Lollyknit

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Skylines, a Dutch startup focused on real-time photo search, has been analyzing the Twitter feed and has some unique insights into the market. From May 23 to June 26, 2011, Skylines found Instagram usage has gone up 38 percent: from 538,000 photos shared weekly to 740,000 photos shared each week.

Instagram CEO Systrom had recently observed that only 11 percent of Instagram members were using Twitter and by that metric, Instagram members might be adding about a million photos a day to Instagram. Add those two data points together, and one can extrapolate that Instagram is gathering steam. The service recently passed the five million subscriber mark. This level of engagement is one of the reasons why I believe Instagram has a chance of becoming the mobile social hub.

Skylines also shared some other data for the five-week period analysis.

• From May 23rd to June 26, 2011, there were 33 million photos shared on Twitter via Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Mobypicture (the four services indexed by Skylines).
• Twitpic is no slouch. It was responsible for sharing of 3.295 million photos during the week of June 20, making it the largest photo-sharing service.
• Yfrog was used to share 2.98 million photos during the same week.
• The growth in the total number of photos shared in the five-week period measured was 17 percent.
• Only 4 percent of the pictures are geo-tagged, while 15 percent have a hashtag.
• Not surprisingly, weekends are the most popular days to share photos.

As the data shows, while Twitter might have launched its own photo sharing service via Photobucket, the independent photo-sharing services have not seen any kind of slowdown, though there are some dark clouds looming ahead for the likes of Twitpic and Yfrog.

Here’s a video interview with Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom.

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