Freepik is a website that offers quality content for graphic designers, you can find vector images, photographs, icons, or PSD templates, among others. started as a search engine for free images, over time it has positioned itself as number 23, among the 100 European companies that advance in growth the most, join us and you will learn more about this company and discover how Freepik makes money with its business It’s an interesting story!
The beginnings of Freepik
Freepik is located in the city of Malaga in Spain, it began in 2011 at the hands of its founders Alejandro Sánchez Blanes, Pablo Sánchez Blanda and Joaquín Cuenca. The latter being one of the founders of Paronomio, a company acquired by Google in Spain. The meaning of freepik is interesting.
Freepik began as a personal project of its founders, with the aim of helping each other in their work, looking for content for their website, including free vector content on blogs. These blogs offered free content, so their way of monetizing was with advertising, but they found it difficult to find images and vectors to create their designs.
As they already had a bank of illustrations, they made the decision to add a robot that would visit blogs and detect the free content and add it to their database. When they saw the usefulness, they decided to publish them, over time it began to grow among users and they saw how useful it was in profits, with a totally free product.
What began as a hobby, has now become a platform with 1.3 billion downloads of its content, especially for designers. Having an exponential growth in just 6 years, already for 2017 they registered a year-end of approximately 15 million euros.
In the beginning, freepik did scraping and added free content that was from third-party websites. At that time it would resemble Google in its image search engine, they were taken to pages that to download the contents they had to follow the rules of said web pages. That generated a lot of trade.
Currently, you can find content such as Shutterstock. Freepik aggregates the content and sends business to Shutterstock with a trade agreement. In addition, there are contents developed by Freepik and its collaborators, which go through control and validation. Freepik offers free, premium content for those users who wish to subscribe to this service.
How Freepik makes money in your business
How Freepik makes money in your business is an interesting story. Yes, because everything they have achieved is without foreign investment, that is, everything that this business generates is from their own cash. Something different from what is generally seen in startups.
Freepik is a sustainable, self-financing business in its own right. The mission of its founders is not to seek outside investment. It is a business that is managed from the Malaga offices, they are not designed there; They have an art direction and an excellent work team which operates remotely and sends the contents.
Currently, Freepik is based on three types of businesses:
- They have a commercial agreement with Shutterstock, commissions are generated for sales produced on the platforms.
- Another way in which they generate income is through the premium subscription of the Freepik files, allowing the absolute use of these files (By using the free files you give Freepik credits, as well as show the authorship). Plus, it gives you access to exclusive premium archive content.
- Another form that generates income, albeit small, is display advertising.
Freepik in recent years has gone from being a company that depends on Shutterstock to generating its own business and being a self-sufficient company. This company is constantly growing, demonstrating its business potential, offering quality content for its clients. Tell us your opinion about this article and share this information with family and friends.