Exclusive: Scoopt doomed by the rise of social networks
Less than two years after acquiring Scoopt, Getty Images has announced the upcoming closure of the first citizen photojournalism company. BJP talks to Scoopt's founder and Getty Images about what went wrong.
Glasgow-based photo agency Scoopt was launched in 2005 to help amateur photographers sell their images direct to newspapers and magazines. Two years later, Getty Images acquired the business for an unspecified sum, announcing that it believed that it could 'offer Scoopt contributors better revenue opportunities' while investing in 'technology upgrades and other enhancements in order to better position the site for future growth' (BJP, 21 March 2007).
However, two years after investing in the citizen photojournalism agency, Getty has decided to shift back its resources to its core businesses. 'We believe that in terms of content there is still a demand,' says Getty spokeswoman Alison Crombie. 'However, we felt that we should concentrate our resources on our core editorial business, see what the media is looking for and what we can provide them with.'
Scoopt's demise marks the end of the road of one of the most ambitious citizen journalism initiatives. Launched by Kyle MacRae, the site emerged just two days before the London bombings in July 2005, which was one of the first major news events when citizen images, often captured on camera phones, were published around the globe.
One of the site's most successful images was taken by Dean Collins in October 2006. It captured the moment when a light aircraft crashed into a 50-storey residential tower block in New York. It was published on the front page of The Times. However, says Crombie, 'people are now more visually educated, there is more awareness that they can interact directly with the media. Every time something significant happens, you will see the BBC or Sky ask for people's photos and videos,' she says.
MacRae agrees. 'To really work Scoopt required massive awareness and that's a tall order,' he tells BJP. 'Next time a plane lands on the Hudson, you really want that picture – not the 24,000 images of snow that the BBC apparently received from viewers this week. Effectively, you need everyone with a camera knowing about Scoopt – and that, thanks to camera phones, means just about everybody, everywhere'.
Scoopt's model, while innovative when it was first launched ('Scoopt was first to market with this model in 2005 and the market leader back in 2007, but we were very, very small and needed a major partner or acquirer to scale,' says MacRae), did not withstand the rise of social networking website such as Twitter, which published the first image of US Airways Flight 1549, which crash-landed on the Hudson River in New York on 15 January.
'My personal view is that the dedicated citizen journalism agency model can never work,' MacRae tells BJP. 'A smarter model is sucking in hot images from wherever they happen to be posted and shared, whether that's Flickr or TwitPic or anywhere else. And there has to be a simple, obvious, one-click route to the commercial market for people who want it. I asked Janis Krums, the guy who shot the Hudson crash picture, whether he'd rather have had 100,000 hits or $100,000, or both, he replied: "Both would be the best! The point that I have told many is that at the moment of taking the picture I had no idea that I had taken the first picture. I had no idea that it would be picked up from my twitter account. So now that I see all that has happened I am going to look into what type of options I might have".'
MacRae continues: 'If you can find a way to filter the occasional hot image from everything else, [then citizen journalism has a future]. But the wider you seek and the more you solicit, the more resources you're going to have to throw at the filtering "challenge". So I think the suck-from-wherever approach has to be the way to go rather than a dedicated agency like Scoopt.'
Getty seems to agree with this assessment, as Crombie says that it will continue to source images from amateur photographers when there is a demand from media outlets. 'We would continue to do that, but it will more on a case-by-case basis,' she says. 'We still see an opportunity with this type of content, but there was a lot of content on Scoopt and we still had to manage it, make sure the metadata was correct, etc. That takes quite a lot of resources.'
On 06 February, Scoopt will close down its uploading facilities and cease licensing any imagery. Users, who have been selected by Getty to be featured in its collections, will see their images be taken down from the Getty website and only be reposted, once the relevant contractual relationship with individual photographers is in place, Getty explains. A holding page will remain until 06 March 2009, at which point all rights over the photos will revert to their owners.
But, professional photographers, which saw Scoopt as a threat to their revenues when it was first launched 2005, will probably not rejoice in its demise. As MacRae says, everybody, everywhere is now a potential citizen journalist. Janis Krums knows it best. His image of a floating plane made the front pages of dozens of newspapers on 16 January, and all he had with him was an iPhone and a Twitter account.
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