📷 📸 Unsplash Integration 📷 📸

Unsplash started as a side project. Hacker Noon started as a side project. Unsplash was first funded by the revenue of the soon to be previous business (Crew). Hacker Noon was first funded by the revenue of the soon to be previous business (ArtMap Inc.).  Results - and not intentions - are what makes the world go round. Both companies saw early results, and identified them as an opportunity greater than their existing business. Both companies had the perseverance to run with it. I’m very excited to work with a game changer in the photo distribution space, Unsplash. 

With this API integration, we are giving our 10k+ contributing writers access to 1.4M+ quality freely usable images within the Hacker Noon editor. The Unsplash library is leveling up the blogging experience on Hacker Noon. To try it out, create an account, start writing a new story, click on the Unplash logo within the flyout menu and search whatever your curious heart desires.

Unsplash is now the 308th most visited site in the world. Hacker Noon is now the 3,048th most visited site in the world. So yeah, they’re a good bit more well known, but we’re headed in the right direction. Since we removed our Medium content management system and replaced it with our own, we’ve moved up 2,200+ spots, ahead of sites I read and respect tremendously, such as ProductHunt, Futurism, Dev.to, and Coindesk.

To date, thousands of Unsplash photos have already appeared on Hacker Noon stories. This integration builds on existing behaviors to better the workflow for contributing writers. 

Building a digital product is always a trade off between inventing the wheel, re-inventing the wheel and figuring out a way to plug in an existing solution — all while making the thing feel like just one quality thing. The reality is that the entire internet industry is built atop the keystrokes of nerds.

Did the world need another content management system? Who’s to say. No software on the market could do what I wanted the software to do, and more importantly, if it’s not your own software your rate of digital iteration will never reach its potential. 

With how the internet has evolved, imagery often serves as the story’s second headline. However you slice curation, the accompaniment of quality images serves the distribution of quality words. This integration will save time for our contributing writers, improving the process of finding great imagery to embody their technology stories.