Jason Calacanis, one of my favorite entrepreneurs, believes an effective metric for judging the health of a startup is to gauge the volume of search traffic resulting from the company’s name. Why? A photographer may be at lunch with a peer and say, “Hey have you checked out GumGum? It’s really cool!” When the friend gets back to a computer, they will mostly likely Google “GumGum.” If your company name is generating more organic traffic over time, then you are doing something right.

It amazes me everyday how much traffic we receive from the keyword “GumGum.” It means we are, or better yet, our partners, you guys, are doing something right!

On a similar note, we are the #5 search listing on Google for “photo licensing.” This is amazing. We have been live for less than 60 days and we are ranking better than Getty and Corbis. Keep chewing GumGum!

P.S. Google indexes frequently. Our ranking may change by the time you read this post. :)

GumGum photos to date have been served via standard OBJECT and EMBED HTML tags. No longer. We are now serving GumGum photos via JavaScript. J.S. provides increased flexibility and compatibility. If for whatever reason you do not want to use our new J.S. embed, the old embed is available as well.

We are also excited to announce the GumGum Footer. Below every photo, an HTML footer will display a link pointing to the content owner’s website. Why is this important? It provides the copyright owner with tremendous SEO value!

One of the more common questions I get is, “How do I convince People.com to license my photos through GumGum?”

My answer, “Today, you are not going to be able to convince People.com to use GumGum. Tomorrow is another story.”

We have our first publisher! It isn’t People.com, but it’s a step in the right direction. TeenSceneMag has published a series of posts using photos licensed through GumGum. Their publisher, Chad K., had the following to say:

“I think GumGum is a great service! It offers smaller blogs the opportunity to publish great photos in an easy way.”

We at GumGum do not fool ourselves into thinking we are going to change the business of online content overnight. It is going to be arduous, but it needs to be done and we are determined to make it happen.