PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Marylandian -- In 2009, Odessa Cozzolino had a vision—what if women could band together to produce a crowd-sourced database of images of female bodies unmanipulated by media forces? She wondered: would it be possible to create a safe, online space where women could browse pictures that their peers took of themselves to gain an empowering assessment of the wide variety of bodies out there in the world?

Taking a leap of faith, she came up with the name "My Body Gallery". After securing the domain MyBodyGallery.com, with start-up spirit she hired "a guy in his garage" to build the initial website. Going live in February of 2010, the website took off wildly. It drew international media attention from mainstream to niche outlets alike, including Good Morning America, Jezebel.com, and the Huffington Post. Ever the savvy businesswoman, Cozzolino realized the site's traffic could support enough advertising revenue to transform what began as a labor of love into a sustainable small business.

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MyBodyGallery.com boasts visitors from every single country in the world—16+ million unique visitors in all. The site has averaged 3+ million pageviews per month over its lifetime. Its nearly 75,000 registered users have uploaded over 60,000 images that fit the publication guidelines (and thousands more that didn't).

To bring MBG into the mobile era, we have teamed with Blackburn Labs to bring our platform to a broader audience.  We are proud to announce that My Body Gallery is now available in the Apple App Store, The Google Play Store, and on a user friendly desktop app.  The new version has a sleek look for a modern audience, but still allows for the same experiences users know and love on the legacy platform.

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The long-term success of MyBodyGallery.com demonstrates that greater-good projects can be financially sustainable using digital advertising as a means of covering necessary costs. It is also a testament to women-owned-and-operated tech projects and the power of crowdsourced content to inspire and aid people all over the world.

MBG invites women to enjoy the experience and share their journey to a more positive self!

www.mybodygallery.com