Some industry observers have suggested that there's a second --
albeit more rational -- Internet bubble forming. Investor money is
flowing again to Internet start-up ventures, including
enterprises that have a citizen-media business model.
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Here are a few of the new companies worth watching as they
evolve. Viable business models for citizen media might appear from any
of them.
Flickr.com
Photo-sharing Web site Flickr,
now owned by Yahoo!, is worth watching for how it's beginning to
monetize some of its services (which were mostly free during the early
days, other than a premium account that allowed for more photo uploads
than
with the free plan). While it's not fully a "citizen journalism" Web
site, people do often use it for that purpose -- with many people
posting photos of major news events and assigning them the same
descriptive "tags" so that others can find them all. (e.g., tsunami)
There's money in citizen photos, and Flickr is pointing the way.
Calling it a "pilot program" for now, Flickr has partnered with several
other companies to allow people to order physical products like
multi-photo books, posters and postage stamps made from photos posted
on Flickr. You also can order a DVD movie of your photos, or DVD
backups or slide shows.
Flickr promises more, so keep an eye on the site for ideas as it commercializes further.
NowPublic.com
An interesting and worthwhile potential use for citizen journalism is
to support collaboration between journalists and the public. An example
of that is NowPublic.com, which
brings bloggers and citizen reporters together with photographers. It's
a collaborative Web site that enables people to identify important
stories and write news articles, and then other people illustrate them
with photos taken at the scene. So, for a citizen reporter's account of
a fire, others who witnessed the blaze might add their photos or video
(or simply additional text information) to the report via
NowPublic.com. (Here's an example on another news topic.)
The company Web site describes NowPublic.com this way: "NowPublic
combines the power of news readers, bloggers, photographers and
writers to create fast, open-source news coverage of the most important
stories emerging anywhere in the world." Founder Michael Tippett
explains it further: "The proliferation of digital cameras, camera
phones and blogs has created a latent throng of reporters who are
perpetually on the brink of breaking tomorrow's news. NowPublic is
increasingly becoming the repository of this footage when it emerges."
Is there a business model for this type of company? If
Tippett's theory is correct and this collaboration of news starts
attracting significant readership -- usurping some of the power of the
mainstream press -- then ad revenues will follow.
Gather.com
Gather.com has been described as
"a kind of eBay for online writers and their readers." The site gathers
content on all manner of topics, and the idea is that, eventually,
popular writers will be able to make a living by posting their work and
attracting an audience. Space will be sold to advertisers, and ad
revenues will be shared with the writers.
With a huge pile of miscellaneous content, how's anything
supposed to get noticed? The site ranks content based on how many
readers it gets, how readers assess the quality and how much
discussion it generates. So the best stuff, in theory, attracts the
most readers and advertising money.
Gather.com is also recruiting bloggers with this ad-share
model. Hobbyists with blogs may be able to make some money by being on
Gather, even if they can't get a deal with a blog network or figure
out how to make money blogging independently. Who knows -- if the
concept proves successful, the best bloggers on Gather.com might even
do better than with a blog network's rates.
The company's founders are positioning Gather.com as a
"democratic" alternative to the mainstream press -- since it brings in
voices of non-professionals and because the site's users "vote" on
what's the best content.
Writers are compensated with "Gather Points," which can be
exchanged for goods from partner companies. Soon, according to the
company, top earners will be able to exchange their points for cash.
With that scheme, Gather.com appears to be positioned to attract more
of the enthusiastic experts, rather than professional experts who would
expect a better payout.
Nevertheless, the idea of compensating citizen journalists or
contributors with something other than hard cash is a model that other
citizen-media operators will want to consider.
Newsvine
Newsvine is an innovative
citizen-journalism-driven Web site that's trying to take advantage of
the concept of using the public as a "giant brain" and news-reporting
and -editing resource. It combines feeds from the Associated Press and
ESPN, recruits independent bloggers and gets the input of readers (via
comments as well as original articles from them).
Users of the site are able to rate the importance of stories,
creating a sort of reader-generated editing system that determines story position, giving the most popular articles front-page
prominence. So, what the site is really about is melding mainstream
journalism with the power of citizen or grassroots journalism.
The site will survive on advertising revenues, and users who
make submissions -- assuming that they are popular -- will share in
that.
Newsvine is creating Web sites for more than 200 U.S. cities (example),
so imagine a localized news service that combines mainstream
news sources with the power of citizen involvement and editing. The
company may partner up with local newspapers, which could syndicate
their content through the Newsvine network.
Digg.com
Digg.com is another news Web site in which "the people" edit the news. That is, people add links to news
stories that they like to Digg.com, then other Digg users can
vote them onto the front page (or reject them). The best stories rise
to the top thanks to the rating efforts of the site's users. We are the
editor.
The service has quickly become quite popular, and when a story
is added to Digg.com, a huge traffic spike goes to the article --
what's been termed "the Digg effect." (It's similar to when a news
story get struck by "the Slashdot effect.")
The site currently includes Google AdSense as its core revenue stream.
What can citizen-media practitioners learn from Digg to support
their operations? I think it's the value of "citizen editing." Digg's
early popularity and buzz factor seem to indicate that the concept has
some strength, and that should translate into advertising dollars.
Other citizen-media operations might want to think not just about
citizen reporting, but also about citizen editing.
Scoopt
Scoopt is a
citizen-news-photography site that collects images that people snap of
news events, then serves as an agency to sell the photos to mainstream
press outlets, sharing the revenues. It's one of several companies that
wants to help eyewitness news photographers get paid for their best
images.
What Scoopt reveals, I think, is that citizen news photography
-- the small slice of it that's high quality and worthy of wide public
view -- won't be free for much longer. Business models for all news
organizations that rely on or plan to rely on citizen photography will
want to plan for this.
