Pexels is a provider of

stock photography Stock photography is the supply of photographs that are often licensed for specific uses. The stock photo industry, which began to gain hold in the 1920s, has established models including traditional macrostock photography, midstock photography, ...

and

stock footage Stock footage, and similarly, archive footage, library pictures, and file footage is film or video footage that can be used again in other films. Stock footage is beneficial to filmmakers as it saves shooting new material. A single piece of stock ...

. It was founded in Germany in 2014 and maintains a library with over 3.2 million free stock photos and videos.

History

Pexels was founded by twin brothers Ingo and Bruno Joseph in

Fuldabrück Fuldabrück is a municipality in the district of Kassel, in Hesse, Germany. It is situated along the Fulda river, 8 kilometers south of Kassel. The municipality of Fuldabrück consists of the former independent villages Bergshausen, Dittershausen ...

Hesse Hesse or Hessen ( ), officially the State of Hesse (), is a States of Germany, state in Germany. Its capital city is Wiesbaden, and the largest urban area is Frankfurt, which is also the country's principal financial centre. Two other major hist ...

. The brothers started the platform in 2014 with around 800 photos. Daniel Frese joined the team in 2015. The graphic design platform

Canva Canva is an Australian multinational proprietary software company that provides a graphic design platform that provides tools for creating social media graphics, presentations, postcards, promotional merchandise and websites. Launched in Austr ...

acquired Pexels in 2018 for an undisclosed amount.

Business model

Pexels provides media for online download, maintaining a library that contains over 3.2 million photos and videos, growing each month by roughly 200,000 files. The content is uploaded by the users and reviewed manually. Using and downloading the media is free, the website generates income through advertisements for paid content databases. There is also a donation option for users, and while attribution of the content creator is not required, it is appreciated. Through the merger with Canva, Pexels' database is available in the Canva application. Pexels is committed to providing a diverse database, for example by including

LGBTQ+ LGBTQ people are individuals who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning. Many variants of the initialism are used; LGBTQIA+ people incorporates intersex, asexual, aromantic, agender, and other individuals. The group i ...

stock content, and through a partnership with Nappy, a platform that focuses on POC content.

License

Pexels originally offered photos under the CC0 Creative Commons license. Instead, it has their own set of rules for the use of their photos and footage. Besides, their license does not permit the user to sell unaltered copies of a photo or video or to resell the content on other stock platforms. It is not allowed to suggest that the people or brands in the images or footage endorse a product or a brand. The photos or videos downloaded from Pexels cannot be used in trademarks, business names, or service marks. Identifiable people from the photos or videos cannot be shown in a negative or offensive way.

Staff

The Pexels staff consists of the three founders, who live in Berlin, Germany, and a team of 40 who are based in Germany, other parts of Europe, and North and South America. The company does not have headquarters; all staff work from their respective homes. Bruno and Ingo Joseph were

CEOs Kea (), also known as Tzia () and in antiquity Keos (, ), is a Greek island in the Cyclades archipelago in the Aegean Sea. Kea is part of the Kea-Kythnos regional unit. Geography It is the island of the Cyclades complex that is closest to Att ...

until November 2018, when Clifford Obrecht, founder of Canva, became CEO of the company. Bruno Joseph was reinstated as CEO in July 2020, but left the company in 2022.Request in

Bundesanzeiger The ''Bundesanzeiger'' is an official publication of the Federal Republic of Germany published by the German Ministry of Justice with a scope similar to that of the Federal Register The ''Federal Register'' (FR or sometimes Fed. Reg.) is the ...

Unternehmensregister Business Register System (, abbreviated URS) is a statistical business register in Germany which provides structural data about economic sectors and serves as the essential source of information about entities which is needed for planning, preparat ...

, 09.07.2020, retrieved 21.04.2021.

References

External links