In this case, commercial use has 2 meanings.
1- In any context where the image is used to support the sale or promotion of a product or a service. This is basically non-editorial use. Example: any image on a corporate website.
2- Put on any website that, although editorial, has enough visitors that people make a living out of it. This is the vague area you are referring to, am I right? Where is the frontier between a personal blog and a commercial one?
At CrowdMedia.co, we only allow editorial use for 2 reasons. You need model release for commercial use (from any recognizable person, brand, design, building), and a lot of photographers just don't want their photos in an ad for a company with what they consider wrong corporate values.
What bothers me at the moment is that photographers can't opt-out. Since a lot of them are paid on a royalty basis, it appears they will be the ones really giving away their content.
I am often asked by photographers if we offer their photos for free at CrowdMedia (http://crowdmedia.co), and the only valid answer for them is NO. Whatever people do, if they do it well and it is useful to others, eventually they should get rewarded for it.
I like Getty's initiative for small non-commercial blogs, but I don't think photographers should be the ones paying for it.
Because they have built a great business in traditional media monitoring for brands and they are adding social media to their mix on an old platform. In a sense, our product would be the perfect addition to their lineup but I don'y think we're ready to be seen as potential sellers, we don,t have enough traction for this yet.
At CrowdMedia.co, we only allow editorial use for 2 reasons. You need model release for commercial use (from any recognizable person, brand, design, building), and a lot of photographers just don't want their photos in an ad for a company with what they consider wrong corporate values.