19 Nov 2015 500px Hires Kelly Thompson as Head of Marketplace
500px continues reinforcing their executive team with experienced industry talent. Today they’ve announced former iStock COO and Getty Images SVP, Kelly Thompson, joins the company as the new Head of Marketplace.
Thompson will be in charge of expanding the marketplace and enhancing the service for enterprise customers.
About Kelly Thompson
Kelly is an industry veteran with a strong background in marketing and product development in tech business. He was with iStock from the start to the end – 7 years in total – taking over from Co-Founder & CEO, Bruce Livingstone, after he left. He was in senior management positions throughout iStock’s phenomenal growth period, which will be extremely valuable experience and knowledge for 500px.
He’s coming from two years as SVP of Innovation at Internet company Benevity, presumably serving out one of the vicious non-compete clauses that Getty Images does so well.
The Announcement
500px announced Kelly as their new Head of Marketplace. In this role, he will be developing products to better serve and increase the company’s enterprise clients, as well as directing the marketplace’s expansion in the photo licensing industry, which is the core of 500px’s current business strategy.
According to 500px’s CEO Andy Yang, the company’s stock business is still at an early stage of development, and they expect Thompson’s leadership to take 500px Prime marketplace to the next level.
Kelly is the latest of 500px’s strategic hires of experienced industry execs. He joins iStock/Getty’s Ellen Desmarais and Veer/Corbis Paul Friessen, whom have also recently joined the Canada-based company. The familiar faces greeting Kelly also include Nuno Silva who worked with him at iStock, was Director of Content at Stocksy during their formation, and has been the key stock photo industry representative at 500px since they launched their marketplace.
Pavel Orekhov
Posted at 12:00h, 19 November500px is collecting a really strong team. Kelly Thompson is very professional and a great fit for senior marketing role. Together with other factors (like a good collection of images with the certain marketable aesthetic) they are likely to become a serious player in photo licensing industry. But from my point of view they will not aim at the current stock images market. This would be too straightforward and with that level of competition would be not really smart. And Kelly knows how to innovate wisely. i think 500px will probably try to create “their own market”, converting customers who need media for…branding or who want to add some “taste of fashion”/”expensive and premium” to their customer experience. Taking their price points and aesthetics, they definitely aim at premium segment.