© Huffington Post. An image sourced by CrowdMedia from Twitter user @mcc_maryland, whose plane was on the tarmac at SFO during the Asiana Airlines crash, was used in a gallery on Huffington Post.
A six-week-old company that connects media organizations to amateur photographers who have taken newsworthy photographs is creating some buzz, and could be poised to add yet another wrinkle to the market for news photography—one professional photographers and their photo agencies may not like.
CrowdMedia, the Montreal-based startup, uses a combination of an algorithm and a manual process to analyze more than 100 million images shared everyday via Twitter. The company identifies the .03% of these images that they consider valuable and newsworthy, reaches out to the creators via Twitter, and asks them to click a link if they would like to make their image available to media organizations.
The creator of a given photograph has to fill out a simple form attesting they are the owner of the image, create an account, and agree to split 50 percent of the profits from the sale of the image with CrowdMedia. Images are then uploaded to the CrowdMedia platform, where media companies can find and purchase them for roughly $20 apiece, regardless of the usage. “After 48 hours the [cost of the] photo goes down to $5, because we believe the value of the photo is in its immediacy,” CrowdMedia co-founder and CEO Martin Roldan told PDN in a phone interview.
At present only non-exclusive rights are offered. “We don’t plan to include exclusivity, for the moment,” Roldan says. “We believe in volume.”
Roldan says the pricing is based on CrowdMedia’s conversations with news outlets and research into the pricing structures of photography and news agencies, Roldan explains. “Right now with press agencies, they have subscriptions that are one-year, multi-year, and it’s extremely complicated. It includes text, video, photos, and [media companies often] pay between $20 to $50 dollars per photo” for newsworthy images. “Since we’re offering 50 percent, they [the creators] get exactly the same amount with us.”
Roldan and his partner first devised the concept for CrowdMedia when they were operating a social media-monitoring tool they created for businesses. Some of their clients were media organizations. “We realized there were a lot of newsworthy social photos coming into our system that no one was using,” Roldan recalls. “News outlets want [photos shared on social media] but it’s really cumbersome, it’s a horrible process to get these photos” by searching for them and reaching out to individual users. CrowdMedia promises to streamline the process, connecting editors directly to social media users and competing with news agencies that have also been attempting to connect their clients with amateur photographers.
Huffington Post is the largest news organization to publish CrowdMedia photographs thus far. The site ran a pair of images of the Asiana Airlines plane crash at San Francisco Airport created by Twitter users. (It’s worth noting that the majority of the 50 images in slideshow created by Huffington Post for their article on the crash were created by pro photographers and sourced from traditional news agencies like Getty and the Associated Press.)
Thus far, Twitter users have been receptive to working with CrowdMedia, Roldan says. “Exactly 23 percent of people we approach create an account and transfer photos. There’s no other internet platform which has a 23 percent conversion rate for people who have never heard of them.”
“I know professional photographers won’t like this,” Roldan admits. But, he says, although amateur photographers’ images are not “as good qualitatively” as those made by professionals, their content is valuable—because of their timeliness and perspective. “Yes there is a competition between amateur social photographers and professional photojournalists, and I think professional photojournalists will have to adapt,” Roldan says.
At present CrowdMedia is only monitoring Twitter for images, and a Twitter executive is one of the their mentors, Roldan says. “We want to make things working as perfectly as possible with twitter and then we’ll be ready to add more platforms.”
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