Pixabay headquartered in Germany offers a digital content platform, which they present as a community for sharing copyright-free images and videos. All contents are released under Creative Commons.
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Podbean
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Podbean is presented as an easy but powerful platform for podcast hosting and monetization, from the company of the same name in New York. Additionally, the Podbean Pro edition is for business enterprises, supporting internal communications by enabling users to create, publish, manage and measure corporate audio and video podcasts at scale, to meet enterprise podcast needs.
This is perfect for any individual or organization that's working on a budget. You'll get stock photos that, while there's a more limited selection than the usual paid sites (Getty, iStock, etc.), are often just as high-quality. For smaller businesses and nonprofits where every dollar counts, I've found myself leaning on Pixabay quite a bit for stock images and, from time to time, will end up buying one of the linked commercial images when Pixabay doesn't have what I need. However, if you have a large budget for stock images, Pixabay will likely not be your best choice, as the paid services offer generous discounts for bulk credit purchases.
Podbean is the best podcast hosting service I have seen so far outside of hosting your own podcast server. It has many tools built in that make hosting and sharing your podcast simple. If you are technically minded, there is good software based on WordPress to create a cheap solution for hosting multiple podcasts, but you don't get as many features and you have to do all the work yourself. If you want a solution to quickly and easily get a podcast off the ground and out into the world without having to worry about lots of technical issues, then Podbean is a good way to go.
Separate photos, illustrations, and vectors—Many competitors have these images all lumped together with a limited ability to sort through them, while Pixabay has a robust library of all of these, making it easy to find what you're looking for.
Free, high-quality images and easy-to-understand licensing rules—Often a new client will have bad image usage habits, freely snagging any image off of google. Pixabay is an excellent resource to give clients a huge range of photos without the fear of getting into copyright trouble.
Sound effects—Free, good-quality sound effects are surprisingly difficult to find amongst competitors, but Pixabay has them in their lineup as well.
One thing that kind of sticks out is that with so much to choose from, you can feel overwhelmed.
Some of the photos I sometimes can find separately by googling. In the music business, it seems like many photos rotate on the web so there isn't as much to pick from.
I didn't see an option for more vertical videos for use in Instagram or TikTok.
The search features are comprehensive and the previews are useful. I really like that they added an option to filter out generative AI content, which can overwhelm a site like this. Sometimes you just want the real thing, especially if you can generate AI images on your own already like I can!
Pixabay has given me the free vectors I need for my whiteboard animation videos, which aren't available on the other sites, in addition to the video and audio clips. They've been around for a long time and have stayed consistent, valuable, and easy to use throughout the years. They were my first site for free downloads and remain my favorite image download site to this day.
For a personal podcast, I host on WordPress with a plugin called Seriously Simple Podcasting. This solution is a bare bones solution, good if you know how to manage a WordPress website and are able to submit your podcasts manually to different apps and services. If you can afford Podbean I would suggest using it because the WordPress route takes a lot more time and technical knowledge. Podbean takes so much of the hassle and work away from the process.
