Cameraphone Photo Agency Makes First Sale
For Scoopt, the photo agency that's trying to sell people's cameraphone pictures to media outlets, the wait is over: about two months after its launch, it's finally sold its first photo. The company, which splits its fees for pictures it sells with the photographer, sold a picture to a British newspaper for a "two-figure sum". Scoopt has 2,000 members in 64 countries now, which sounds impressive, but given the random nature of newsworthy events and user submissions, they're going to have to boost that figure much, much higher to sell more photos. One problem facing companies looking to monetize citizen journalism is that they're often relying on untrained people to submit information. While that's sort of the point, it probably wouldn't hurt to give this new class of journalists some training to improve the quality of their work. But the biggest problem may be competition -- users are submitting plenty of material to news outlets for free, or even just publishing it themselves.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Obviously our scepticism was misplaced...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]