Freepik Company was founded in 2010 in Málaga to create a platform where designers could find free graphic resources. The Spanish stock platform now provides photos, vectors, Photoshop documents (PSDs) and icons throughout the world, and is used by major multinationals including Microsoft, FedEx, Amazon, and Spotify.
Over the past two years, the company has doubled the number of graphic resources available on its platform, and this month it surpassed the 5 million mark. Freepik Company now offers the largest amount of graphic resources for free, or for a very competitive annual subscription fee, with 100 million downloads every month. The company employs 160 people with a turnover of €17 million in 2018, and has been listed on the Financial Times “Fastest Growing European Companies” Ranking.
Freepik Company is the parent brand for different design and creativity products including Freepik, a website in which any user can search among over three million vectors, PSDs, or stock photos; Flaticon, which offers over two million editable and exclusive icons; and SlidesGo, which offers an extensive catalog of free Google Slides themes and PowerPoint templates.
Unlike other stock or microstock platforms, Freepik and Flaticon users can access a large variety of graphic resources for free – around 40% of the content available – under the specific condition of attributing the author of the resource they download and use. Users can alternatively access all of the content offered by Freepik and Flaticon for less than €100 per year, without the obligation of attribution.
The use of stock and microstock resources grows every year for personal and professional use, to the point that Google has decided to implement a “stock” filter or tag in its images category search. Google announced this intention at CEPIC, the industry’s major event in Paris last month. According to Google, their aim is to encourage the attribution of any type of graphic resource found on their search engine, and to support the stock industry’s purpose of providing free images, or affordable ones in exchange for attribution.
“If a company like Google has decided to give visibility to the microstock segment with this announced tag or filter implementation, it’s great news for platforms like ours because it’ll help all players in our industry pursue the challenge of making users provide attribution for the resources they find on our platform, when required,” said Pablo Blanes, co-founder of Freepik Company. “It’s a very simple, free and positive habit to incorporate in our professional and personal activities and an easy way to help the development of creativity, design, and arts.”
Currently, there are hundreds of millions of stock resources available on the Internet, of which around 40% require of attribution, which means that any person using them has to mention the source and author, for example, “Vector designed by Freepik”.
