A New Life for 'Life': Time Inc. Launches Photo Site

Life went through several incarnations as a print magazine, most recently, and least iconically, as a weekend newspaper supplement that lasted three years.

Now the brand is being resurrected yet again, this time in a way that combines the nostalgia it evokes with what just might prove to be a more forward-looking business model. Today marks the launch of Life.com, a photography site rich in features and functionality and created as a partnership between Time Inc., which published the magazine, and the giant photo agency Getty Images.

Pooling Life magazine's vast archive -- only 3 percent of which has ever been published -- with a Getty collection that grows by 3,000 images a day, Life.com will comprise, from the moment of its inception, the single largest online cache of professional photography, with 7 million pictures and counting.

The vastness of that trove, and its searchability, is key to the immersive user experience Life.com is hoping to create, says editor Bill Shapiro, who also edited the supplement. "My whole thing is about getting lost in the photos," he says. "I call it a post-literate experience."

Content on the site will be divided into five chief areas: News, Celebrities, Sports, Travel and Animals. A team of five editors will curate various topic pages within those areas, and users will also be able to create their own photo collections, which they'll be able to then embed on non-commercial blogs or share on networking sites like Facebook. Celebrities will also be invited to guest-edit pages; first up will be Ellen DeGeneres, who will curate a collection of dog photos.

Several more sophisticated features won't be introduced until a few months after the launch. One of them, Timeline, will allow users to upload their own photos and mingle them with Life and Getty images to create a sort of scrapbook of an era. "Everyone always asks where you were when Kennedy died," says Shapiro. "Where the historical and the personal collide -- that to me is really the future of Life."

The site's business model is primarily advertising-driven -- Rolex will be the exclusive sponsor for the first month, and ad sales are handled through sister site Time.com -- but down the road there will be a significant commerce component as well, says CEO Andy Blau. Soon, users will be able to make collections of their favorite photos and buy them as print-on-demand magazines and books. "We're trying to embed e-commerce wherever we think consumers will find it useful," he says.

Blau says Time Inc. doesn't have specific traffic targets set for the site, but he predicts it could be attracting "several million unique visitors" within a few months.