Citizen photojournalism richer than most agencies

July 31, 2007 by pmelcher.

NowPublic, a Community driven web 2.0 Canadian website has scored $10.6 million in funding in the hope of becoming successful. If a traditional photo agency, with an existing and proven business model, with photographers under contract would try to get such funding, they would be escorted out the door while hearing laugher in the background.

So what makes NowPublic so special ? Or any other Crowdsourcing powered site so special to investors ? well, part of it is the free labor. In the case of NowPublic it is unclear what percentage they will offer if and when they license an image. Images seems to be held in the Flickr happy Creative Common arena right now. Maybe those “news ” photographers will be happy just to see their credit, and why shouldn’t they ? Or license via AP, as NowPublic offers as an option. But then, why send your valuable images to NowPublic when you could send them directly to AP and cut the middle man ?
What amazes me is that publishing news images taken by amateurs is as old as the photo agencies business. It is called “pick up” in English, and “recup” in French. What everyone seems to forget about the now infamous London bombing images is that, if wasn’t for the professional photo agencies that licensed them, no one might have seen them. It is one thing to get an image, it is a whole different world to know how to license it.

Even NowPublic, who has a licensing deal with AP, knows that.

But no one ever thought of making “pick ups” their unique revenue stream, and for a good reason. Events of a magnitude big enough to justify hunting down an amateur for coverage are rare and few. Certainly not enough to run a business.

Photo agencies have been aware of this for a long, long time and thus have paid professionals to cover the more regular news. Apparently this information has not hit Canada, nor some venture Capitalist. However, the fact that they can sell the company to a Getty or a Corbis as did Scoopt.com could be the motivation behind the investment.

Once again we see the continuing trend of building a website where everyone can participate, make a lot of marketing noise, get some venture money and hopefully sell it to someone before it crashes: that is Web 2.0.

Photography is a prime target since Yahoo bought Flickr. It is also very easy to set up and operate. There is plenty of freeware that makes it cheap and available to anyone.

I suggest the next multi million dollar user generated, community driven platform should be one where users can exchange images of cows.

NowPublic article

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