A Photo Bug

Interview

Evgeny Tchebotarev, Founder, CPO 500px

Evgeny Tchebotarev is the 30-year-old, Russian-born Chief Photography Officer of the popular online photo publishing and sharing site 500px. The site has rocketed to popularity over the past few years and become the go-to site for serious photographers from all over the world to share their best work and, with 500px’s help, license it on to Google, Flipboard, Microsoft, Sony and hundreds of other outlets.

Where are you from in Russia and when did you leave?

I’m from Moscow, where I was born and lived until I left in 2001, when I was 16 years old, along with my family, to live and study in Canada.

How did you end up in Canada and on this business path?

I think I always wanted to be a photographer... but I picked up photography as a serious hobby only in 2002, after moving to Canada. I studied at Ryerson University in Toronto and chose Finance as my major, so 500px was the intersection of business (my trade) and photography (my passion).

So how (and when) did 500px come about? Was it frustration working with existing sites? Or seeing a specific need out there that was unfilled?

I got into photography in 2002... and by 2003 I created a photo community on the LiveJournal platform that I called ru_foto (Russian photography). It’s alive to this day, but I got frustrated with it pretty quickly — there was a lot of mess and photos would range from 200x200 pixels (super tiny), to huge, unedited files (something like 2000x1536 for a 3 megapixel camera). It wasn’t pretty, but it was super popular.

So in early 2004 I created “500px,” another community on LiveJournal, with the goal to make up some rules and make it pretty — one of the first rules was to post photos only 500px wide, so when you are scrolling, you have a great user experience. 

Back then, there was no Flickr, no Facebook, no Instagram... you get the idea. So I just started something that filled my need and the need of thousands of other people who quickly joined 500px and started posting and engaging on 500px. In 2006 it grew into a website, which was a replica of what was on LiveJournal, and in 2009 I teamed up with Oleg Gutsol to build a 2.0 version of 500px, which is what we see today — a community+marketplace that rewards photographers with exposure and sales.

Where do you see the site being in five or even 10 years’ time? 

Technology moves super fast these days. Ten years ago we didn’t know what Facebook was; there was no free Wi-Fi, no iPhones, etc. So looking ahead 10 years will mean that I most likely will be wrong.

We have achieved a near total instant connectivity with the whole world. I think humans are very visual by nature, so I’d expect more dynamic photo and video apps that allow you to share where you are, what you do, what feelings you have. What we currently have — Snapchat, Meerkat, Whatsapp, etc., but supercharged — always connected, always on. I expect a come back of Google Glass technology, so we can share what we see instantly – by just thinking.

So with that, 500px will be very different. I expect automatic computer vision tech that can take all the photos you have ever taken and select the best ones automatically and publish them, based on how good they are, or how much perceived value they have. I also expect to revolutionize photo licensing, so that every small business and every brand in the world can afford to license photos anywhere for anything — and do that without even thinking twice. It’s like the way we moved from buying actual CDs (a lot of friction) to using Pandora, Songza or Spotify for music.

How do you think that your own Russian background and worldview has influenced the current and future trajectory of the company, if at all?

I don’t really think it affected much, other than made it a little bit harder to raise money, a little bit harder to convince people of your idea. To this day, every conference or every panel that I attend, there’s confusion about how to pronounce my first and last name. However, things go the other way as well: living in Canada opened my eyes and shaped my views on democracy, diversity, equality and tolerance, and I’m very grateful for that. RL

An example of Tchebotarev’s fine landscape photography, taken in Patagonia, South America.

About 500px.com

Users: Almost 6 million

Monthly page views: 150 Million

Size of photo library: 50M photos