A new Photo Business Rises from the Crowd
Scoopt, stakes out a spot where the market and the masses meet
Gregg Osofsky interviews Kyle MacRae, cofounder of Scoopt
Kyle MacRae founded Scoopt in 2005 with his wife using startup money from the sale of their home. Two years later, after pioneering the commercial licensing of citizen journalism, Scoopt is owned by Getty Images and distributing content to global media buyers. Kyle still runs the company with his wife out of Glasgow, Scotland. He sees citizen journalism as a proven commodity whose effect on the marketplace of ideas is only just beginning to take shape.
Gregg Osofsky: Where did the idea for Scoopt come from?
Kyle MacRae: If you remember the Asian tsunami, Boxing Day 2004, that was the event. I was living in France at the time. The only English language channel was CNN. I was watching this event unfold and I was fascinated by the fact that everything I saw taken was by people who were just there at the time. This wasn’t professional footage. Professional journalists hadn’t gotten there in time. And it just raised the question, the potential is there, people have the cameras, the camcorders, the camera phones, they have the technology in their pockets to capture an event like this. The mainstream media clearly wanted to use that content, and needs to use it, so how are they getting it? And it was really an old-fashioned model of air-dropping in journalists with envelopes stuffed full of dollars and buying people’s cameras from them, extracting the footage and feeding it up over a sat (satellite) link, and all of this kind of struck me as nonsense. You can get rid of the middle man here and connect on the ground directly with media organizations. The big question mark was how do you do that? Who wanted to represent these people? And that was the opportunity here.
Q: So your initial impulse was as a journalistic idea, rather than a business model?
A: Yeah, I was a freelance journalist myself, for 10 years. I was working the IT sector. Never sold a photo. Not my world. I was immersed enough in media to understand that if you have something valuable, like a photograph, there’s got to be a market for that. You just have to broker the deal in the same way I was brokering the written word, as a freelance journalist.
Q: In addition to the idea, did you bring to the table existing relationships with media outlets?
A: Not so much. A little, but more just knowledge of how the media works. An understanding of how a news desk, or a picture desk, what they need. The kind of pressures that these guys were under. And that actually, was one of the big mistakes that a lot of our competitors made when they came along after Scoopt. For instance, you can upload your own pictures, set your own price, set your own license, get it quoted in the public gallery on the Web and sit back and wait for some hard press picture editor to come along and download it and pay you. Unfortunately, you’ll wait the rest of your life, because that isn’t how the industry works. Just like in news and picture desks, these people are working under tremendous pressure and they need this content to be pushed to them. It needs to arrive on their monitor, on their desk, print-ready or broadcast-ready, or whatever it happens to be, and I understood enough about that to realize that Scoopt as an agency had to do two things. We had to reach out to the public and say, “send us your content.” We then had to prepare that content, price it, license it, push it to the media customers in a way that they were already used to. I would’ve loved the passive gallery model, but we just confirmed it with a few editors and they laughed.
Q: How did you get the technology together?
A: I understood a bit about mobile phones — I was actually writing a book about it at the time. I put the job out to bid. I found a Web developer who completely bought into the idea and we just outsourced the work to him. It was actually March 2005 when we made the commitment that we were going to do this. We got the Web site live on the 4th of July that same year.
Q: At this time, had you been aware of the “crowdsourcing” phrase, meme?
A: Not “crowdsourcing.” Citizen journalism, yes. We weren’t trading on the phrase crowdsourcing. In fact, we still don’t.
Q: How does the model work? I’m a guy with a cell phone and I just took a picture of something.
A: Simple and complicated as that. On one level, this is all about the numbers. The chances that you, personally, having a cell phone, will come across some earth-shattering event are actually very small. You’ll wait the rest of your life for a plane to fall out of the sky, and when it does, you’re battery will be flat and you’ll miss it. So, it’s about the numbers, it’s about having as many people aware in the marketplace as possible. Because the potential, or the reality is, that the first person on the scene is going to be you or me or somebody like us. It’s not going to be a professional photographer or a news journalist. So, it’s not enough for you and me to dedicate the rest of our lives to chasing down news stories. We do need the power of the crowd.
So, come the moment that anyone gets a potentially valuable photo or video, that’s when we need them to send that to us. Our model works that you have to be a Scoopt member or ideally you are a member before you send something in to us. Clearly if it's super valuable and you’re not, then we can talk you through the sign-up process at the time. But this actually becomes a critical step. You have to accept certain responsibilities. The essential one being that you claim copyright. You are saying essentially that you took this picture yourself, you didn’t just pinch it from the web, it wasn’t your mate's, it wasn’t just something somebody SMSed you on your cell phone. This is really important when you’re dealing in commercial markets. Because if we’re licensing a picture commercially, we have to have certain rights to the copyright to sub-license it. It’s a bit of a pain frankly. But you have to accept our terms and conditions. There are certain key phrases in there. You own the copyright, you took it yourself. The picture was taken legally. It’s not a gross invasion of privacy. That’s a tricky one. That’s where, as an agency, our editorial process kicks in, because your average member of the public isn’t going to understand that, but we have to.
So it’s basic stuff like that. It (membership) is also to be able to identify the photographer. If we’re going to pay you or represent you, we need to know who you are. You can do this anonymously. You can protect your identity from the public. We do this all the time. That’s fine. We’ll protect their anonymity all the way down the line. But we, as a business, have to know who you are. And that comes through membership as well.
Q: What kind of volume are you dealing with?
A: Varies enormously. And it's slightly misleading to even think in these terms. Because, for instance, I’m sitting here now, a live feed of content is coming in, and someone sent in over 100 pictures of a very local event in Wales. Some town councilor has launched an anti-drug campaign. And I’m sitting thinking here, OK, there’s over 100 pictures here. That’s great for the stats, but they have no value whatsoever, other than potentially at the very very local level with the local free sheets, but they have their own people there anyway. Of course, other times we’ll get one crackin’ picture from someone we’ve never heard of before. Yesterday, last night, we had one come in from a captain in the U.S. Army of Dick Cheney, who was in Iraq, and it was just a picture of Cheney looking directly in this guy’s camera giving the most evil grin you can imagine. And that’s just an instant hit. So, we kick it straight into gear, very quickly email exchange with the guy, I push it out to the Getty Images team and they put it on the Getty Images Web site instantly. So that’s a great example of one picture that sells quite nicely.
Q: So Getty puts it on their gallery site. Are they also doing the hard sell?
A: Yes, they do. Getty are masters at this business. They’ve got phenomenal scale of sales reach. What it boils down to is that, if a picture can be sold, in any market in the world, they’ll do it.
Q: You wrote something last year that said you were having a hard time hitting news desks. Has that changed?
A: Yeah. One of the challenges as a startup, particularly as a small Scottish startup, is always, was always, one of scale. As a Web business, we can court the media and advertising and PR. We can get thousands of members in countries around the world sending us pictures, but to actually sell those pictures into all these different markets is a very big task indeed. We realized pretty early on that we could get the UK market covered pretty easily. We developed contacts on virtually every news and picture desk in the UK and some in the States. And one or two in western Europe, and a few in Australia. And that was OK, we could always push content to them. But we always knew at some point we would need a strategic partner, like Getty Images, to take on the full blown sales.
Q: But getting on news desks? That’s happening? It’s not just all paparazzi?
A: The balance is. I did analysis of this once. It was 40 percent hard news, 30 percent celebrity news, not paparazzi celebrity, but actually some kind of a story (a film premiere, etc.), I think then, 20 percent was stock imagery, which isn’t really our market at all, and the rest was about 10 percent sports, etc. Out of all of that, 1.5 percent I would define as paparazzi, in that kind of ballpark. Very low. And I have a fairly stringent view of this as well. So it kind of surprised me. ... Now of course, we’re on to Getty and they just don’t do pap. So we’re pushing more away from celebrity in general and much more towards news.
Q: But you said in this article a year ago, “Inevitable, gratifyingly, celebrity material came flying in”?
A: Now that Press Gazette piece in interesting. It marked a change in direction for Scoopt, which I’ve since come to regret slightly. That was me saying, OK we do celebrity quite well and we’re going to embrace it and we’re going to be quite open about it. The reason why we did that is because we always knew that the real potential for Scoopt was as a new organization, and in order to attract advertisers and partners and, ultimately, an acquisition company, we had to steer clear of the hard paparazzi material, even if we wanted to go down that route. So few people will touch it. The picture that clinched it was a picture of Michelle Rodriguez. She was just getting hammered in a bar on tequila. And these were real pap pictures, and we managed to sell them pretty much everywhere. And at that time we thought we actually needed some money in this business. We were bootstrapping it all the way, Jill and I. We had sold our house to launch the business. Never had a penny of investment in the business. We had funded it all ourselves. And with the Michelle Rodriguez pictures, we had made a bit of cash at the time.
So that marked a change of direction, early 2006. But as we said, we were never comfortable being thought of as a pap organization. Then, luckily, we got some decent news pictures coming through and could focus on them. And then, at some point fairly soon thereafter, we could stop talking about celebrities. So it was a little bit of an aberration in the middle of this venture. If we were a paparazzi organization, they wouldn’t have come near us. Celebrity is OK so long as it's valid. But then you get into all sorts of problems of definition. Where do you draw the line? What’s the difference between candid and pap? But Getty was very concerned about the reputation, their own reputation and getting involved with citizen journalism and crowdsourcing, etc. and luckily they were convinced that we were actually an ethical business. We have a code of conduct for citizen journalists and, by this point, we were turning away anything that was borderline paparazzi. I just kept stressing that that’s not what we do. We’re into news, we’re a news agency. So it worked out best in the end.
Q: What commission do photographers make?
A: It’s set commission. At the moment, we pay 40 percent royalty on the gross sale. The photographer gets that. Now that includes what a sub-agent might get off the top, a sub-agent that Getty may use to also sell the picture. With this deal, we pay the photographer 40 percent of the gross sale, which is a pretty good deal for them. In most cases, Getty does direct sales anyway.
Q: What is your relationship with Getty?
A: They bought the company outright and now Jill and I are Getty Images employees.
Q: Was that you goal when you got started?
A: No comment on that. [Laughs] That’s a little tricky. Anything involved with the acquisition itself I’m supposed to refer to them.
Q: How does pricing work when you go to news desks?
A: Any publication will have a space rate, which depends on the size of the image and how and where it's used on the page. So a quarter page image on page 18 for instance, will fetch a fixed price. However, in most cases, with the kind of material we’re dealing with, you throw the space rates out the window and you negotiate directly. And that’s when the actual content comes into play. If it’s a picture of the beach scene, that’s one thing. But if it’s a picture of Paris Hilton crashing her car, it might be used on the same page and same size, but it's worth much more.
Q: Where are you at numbers-wise? What can you share about data points? How many photos? Profitable?
A: I’m very limited in what I can tell you now. Before our acquisition I was very frank about this sort of thing, but now I have to be very circumspect. In terms of numbers, we have just under 20,000 members in about 150 countries.
Q: Has your site been redone since the launch?
A: Yes. We completely redesigned the site at some point in 2006. It’s now been through a full rework, which will hopefully go live by the end of June. We’re doing some other things, including a gallery and making the user interface more interactive as well, more community based.
Q: Are you leading that? Or is Getty?
A: No that’s very much me. They’re very frank about it. They’ve got no direct experience running a business like this. They see the potential of it obviously — we got a front page last week — but in terms of actually running the Scoopt business and building the Scoopt brand, that’s very much still in our laps.
Q: Still just you and your wife?
A: Yes it is. Before acquisition, we didn’t have any employees but we subcontracted a bunch of things. But right now, it’s the two of us as sole employees. Though I should say, the hardest part of running Scoopt for us was actually selling the pictures, and now that’s the easiest part by far. You just tap into Getty. It leaves here through the FTP channel and that’s it. Their sales team, the news desk, takes over from there. We’re the first filter if you like, we’re doing editorial.
Q: How far did you take this on your own?
A: I can’t tell you anything to do with sales. We sold to every daily and most weekend newspapers in the UK, and most of the magazines. Our job was to identify buyers and push it out to them, but once you start doing that, the phone started ringing and people started coming to us. Because they started to realize that we would get the kind of content that you wouldn’t necessarily get from a Getty or Reuters or AP. When we started the business, it was completely unknown. We were first into commercial citizen journalism, the first agency to do this, in terms of actually selling amateur content to the mainstream press. So there were various questions. Would anyone every send us anything? Didn’t know. Would anyone ever buy it? Didn’t know. If they did buy it, would they be looking to pay $5 or would they pay the full commercial rate? Didn’t know any of that. The first 18 months of this business was all proof of concept. It was all establishing, is there really a market here? And we did that pretty successfully.
We then got to the stage where we had to scale the business, we simply had to, for all sorts of reasons. Not the least, it’s not fair having lots of members all over the world sending you valuable pictures and we just can’t do anything with them because we don’t have the contacts. That’s when we started looking very hard at, how do you scale this? Two models: get a whole bunch of venture capital in, give up ownership of the business, blow a few million in advertising and the rest, or start talking to the big establishment players and see if we could get their interest. And that’s what we did. We spoke to everybody. And all of the major players expressed some kind of interest in Scoopt. In the end it was Getty Images that took the plunge.
Q: Competition. Did you feel fortunate or smart to end up where you did?
A: Mixed feelings about that. We were smart about it because we knew how the industry worked from the inside. But, to the average member of the public, they don’t know how the industry works so they didn’t appreciate how smart we were. And when you see the opportunity to upload your picture in a gallery, see it online instantly, and you have this illusion that media buyers are coming along in droves and maybe they’re going to buy your picture in five minutes time, that’s quite appealing, and I always felt we were up against it there. It was just a perceptual thing. The reality of course is that we were working frantically behind the scenes figuring out who was going to buy these pictures, pushing it (the service) to them and then negotiating hard. Whereas our competitors, by and large, were just sticking stuff on their Web site and keeping their fingers crossed. And as far as I could establish, they were making minimal sales, whereas we were. We made sales very very early on. It took us three months to make the first one, then it picked up very quickly from there.
Q: So that was the key strategic difference between you and the competition?
A: It was. We adopted — although we were a new business model in a new space, we were actually operating a really old business model. We were just operating like a traditional picture agency. In fact, almost exactly the way that Getty Images operates now. The difference being that they have hundreds of professional photographers and we have thousands of members of the public, amateur photographers. But the editorial and sales process is virtually identical.
Q: You didn’t get blinded by the technology?
A: No. It is always, at least until now, a pretty manual business. It’s not accidental that Getty Images employs hundreds of sales staff working very hard to push content out. It would be lovely if you could automate it all. But actually, you just have to go into any daily newspaper news desk and look at the tens of thousands of images that are flooding through their news desk, and you realize that you have to be in that flow.
Q: What do you think motivates the people who contribute to your business?
A: I don’t think its strictly money, though obviously with Scoopt, money is a key motivator. No question about that. We are in no way ashamed of that. We are dangling dollars and saying, “Your pictures are valuable. If you go directly to the mainstream media you’ll get ripped off. Come to us, you’ll get a fair deal.” So it’s absolutely a key motivator.
It’s not the only one. This is where, at times, we don’t ... I’m still trying to figure out where we fit in with some of the non-commercial citizen journalism places. Lots of our members have two motivators. (For some, it's) to just get the news out there, to be part of it. To have a voice and have their voice heard and to contribute. In many cases, they feel that they’re on the scene of something that’s important and they just want to get the pictures and stories out there to the widest possible audience, and they’re not actually thinking about money. Some people are in it purely for the money. Couldn’t care less where it’s published, they just want to know how much they’ll get for it. But there is a definite overlap here.
There was an interesting one just the other day. We were talking to someone who runs a very high traffic blog called Zombietime.com. What this guy does, he’s very secretive, but he covers political events, rallies, demonstrations in northern California and his blog is full of excellent photographs. And these get picked up and used commercially all the time. He just approached us, he sent in a fantastic set from a demo and we got into a fairly lengthy exchange with the guy. What we really want is for him to send these pictures to us exclusively, so that we can market them as exclusive images the world over. He was having none of that. His priority is to put them on Zombietime and run his blog. He’s not making any money from it. He doesn’t care, he’s working for a higher purpose, if you like, and that’s his motivator. He’s very happy for us to sell his pictures if we can, and he’s very happy to get a cut of that, but it's not his motivator. He was categorical about this. He would never not publish a hot picture on Zombietime, even if it devalued it commercially, and I think that’s absolutely fair enough. It’s just the nature of this world that we’re in, this crowdsourcing, Web 2.0 world: Content does want to be free and people do want to share. So how do we work around Zombietime and others like him? Well, the way we’re doing it here experimentally is, he is now carrying a badge at the bottom of his blog saying, if you want to use any of the pictures commercially, contact my agent, Scoopt. And that’s great. We’ll then handle the pictures and broker the sales. He’s happy with that because he doesn’t have to deal with the media. We’re happy with that because that’s what we do. And it’s also a positive disincentive for news organizations to just lift his pictures without credit and without payment, which they have done.
Q: So, Getty wants to keep the Scoopt brand?
A: Very much so, yeah. Scoopt brand is essential.
Q: So any other motivators?
A: Getting your voice heard. People do by and large want to be heard, to have a voice. To contribute. They don’t just want to consume the news anymore. They want to be a part of it. And we do play a part in pictures. Obviously we’re focused on commercial content. That gets interesting in itself as well. Let’s go back to that example of these pictures coming in from Wales. The guy or girl taking these, presumably thinks it's an important story and probably at a very local level, it is reasonably important. And it probably does deserve a local audience. And you have to start thinking about, is there actually a non-commercial way of publishing this kind of content at the local level? That’s something we’re going to start looking at at Scoopt. It’s something I’ve steered away from completely until now, but we will start thinking about. The way I tend to look at this is based on end use as well. If you take a simple picture of a news story, a tsunami or flood, or whatever it is, if you’re happy for that picture to be used non-commercially, the Web over, the world-over, then fantastic. Where we do have an issue is if CNN wants to put it on a bulletin and broadcast it and sell advertising on the back of it. That crosses a line between content being free for the greater good, for the widest possible audience, and simple exploitation. Now, one of the ways we’ve tried to tackle this is working with Creative Commons. We have partnered with them before and we’re talking with them again now. What Creative Commons does very very well is protect content for noncommercial use. You can dictate, you can say, yep, your picture can be shared in any way whatsoever, but no derivations can be made, or proper credit has to be given and passed on. It’s all non-commercial and works wonderfully well. Where it falls down is when CNN or a newspaper comes on the scene and wants to actually license it commercially. Creative Commons simply doesn’t handle commercial licensing. We’re looking at a way of being a commercial partner, and that I think can work really really well. You don’t want to restrict the flow of content, we don’t want the Zombietime guy not publishing his pictures. We want them to spread as much as possible. We just want to be sure that if they’re being used in a commercial sense, that a fair payment is made. That’s what we do with the licensing partner there.
Q: Two years in, what have been your big milestones? First sale was three months, what was the next big milestone for you?
A: Lots of little ones, first international sale, first video (we’ve only made two, that was pretty short lived). I guess the one I will always think of was the first front page we had. And that was the London Times. What I loved about this story, was that it was a plane crash in Manhattan with a baseball player, Cory Lidle crashing into a skyscraper in Manhattan. Now this is in the heart of the media world, a densely populated part of the planet, thousands of witnesses. So you’re thinking, how can Scoopt possibly compete with that? Reuters is around the corner. And we did compete. A guy who was working in his office at the same height as the crash, just across the block, heard the crash, picked up his camera, and fired off a series of brilliant shots. And, unlike everything else, they weren’t taken at ground level and they just captured the scene perfectly. He phoned us. I was bathing my children. The phone rang at about 8:30 p.m., I picked it up and the guy said, "There’s just been a plane crash." We’re all thinking, gosh it’s the next 9/11. He emailed the pictures to us. We had them on every British news desk within 15 minutes of the phone call. Within 20 minutes of that, we had secured the front page of the Times. The Herald used it as well. A few others did as well. I just love the fact that we can compete. Even with a massive public event in Manhattan, we can still get the best pictures. And crucially, we got them into all the newspapers in the UK before any of the big players did. That, for me, was a milestone. That was the proof of concept. Of course, that’s the kind of big hit that we needed to convince a Getty Images that there actually is a business here. This isn’t just about local cell phone pictures about daft local news. For any news organization, what they need is the front page and they need it every day of course. And this was demonstrating that Scoopt, a wee Scottish startup with a few thousand members and a budget of absolutely zero can do this, we can beat you to the front page of the Times when something like this happens. That was the key milestone in this business.
Q: What do you think the major social impact of citizen journalism is? And, specific to photo journalism, how do you see this playing out and what kind of impact does it have on our culture?
A: I simply don’t know the answer to that. Since we’ve been focusing so much on getting hot newsworthy pictures, Scoopt hasn’t been involved in the social media side of this. Some people call it the parallel or alternative media. There’s always been two wings of citizen journalism. There’s been the parallel or alternative, un-editorialized, media view where ordinary people get to tell the news in their own way and there have been some very successful enterprises in that direction, blogging being a part of it, and in some cases augmented with pictures and video as well. That, in its own way, has been a big big success. How much it has actually impacted the mainstream media is still open to question. I think its very easy for all of us who work in the new media, who work in the Web, to overestimate the importance of any of this. Most people today, if you ask them what citizen journalism or social media or Web 2.0 or crowdsourcing is, if you ask my mum or if you asked my friends what any of this meant, they would stare blankly. They don’t have a clue. They still read daily newspapers. They might use the BBC Web site and that’s kind of it. Those of us who work in this world every day get very excited about the hits and what kind of impression we’re making, and I’m just skeptical about it.
Some of the spinoffs, actually, have been fantastic. The Guardian newspaper is one of the leaders in this field. They launched something last year called "Comment is Free" and then right on the very bottom, “But facts are sacred.” What this did was open up every single Guardian staffer and freelance journalist to the audience in a big scale. No longer could you write a piece in The Guardian, publish it in print and then hope it would turn into tomorrow’s paper. You’re suddenly accountable to your readers in a very very public way. And it just really took off. People would comment. It’s in a massive wiki blog format. A lot more content was also just put on the Web and not in print, so they expanded it beyond daily content. And it was an open invitation to every Guardian reader to get involved. And boy they have, in some numbers. It’s been very very successful for them. Very challenging I think for the older school of journalists to suddenly have to do this. If you’ve been living in your little bubble for 30 or 40 years churning out your columns, and you might get a few letters to the editor, which you can safely ignore, everything changes when that gets online and there’s an open invitation to comment. Suddenly your readers start proving the point that Dan Gillmor made not long ago, that your readers actually do know a lot more than you. And they will let you know about it very quickly. That has been the overwhelmingly positive experience, and it's something that everybody working in journalism just has to get used to and adapt to. And the end result is positive for everybody. You do get more depth, broader understanding. You move away from one person’s often opinionated or prejudiced view of something. Even the BBC, they were one of the first ones to solicit pictures from their viewers, and they do it all the time (of course now everybody else does it). They’ll broadcast a news story on TV or the Web, and they’ll say, "If you have pictures send them to us." By and large they’re not doing it commercially, and they’re relying on the crowd to supply them with free content, which they can use to keep their competitive edge. That’s where I start to have an issue with it. I say, "No BBC, if you’re going to use this competitively to keep your audience, then you’ve got to pay for it. In the same way you’d pay your professional staffer or freelance photojournalist for the content, you should pay these people."
Q: Is fraud an issue you have to deal with?
A: Two issues. It’s absolutely an issue that we’re aware of and have to deal with. As does Getty, Reuters and everyone else. No getting around that. I would love to have a pat answer, but no, it’s an issue. Now people are really savvy about using Photoshop and other image editors and we are waving the dollar sign, so we’re giving people an incentive. The way we tackle this is with an editorial stance that is skeptical and verging on cynical, to be honest. When something comes in that looks to good too be true, we instantly react, "Ah no, forget it." Having said that, the other wing of this, it hasn’t been an issue for Scoopt. A bit like the copyright theft, the pornography, whatever, it just hasn’t transpired, we don’t get fraudulent material. We are intensely attuned to this risk though. Once or twice we’ve had to walk away from something because we’re not comfortable. But if you think Scoopt is paranoid about this, Getty Images news desk is much more so. Even if something gets through us, which in highly unlikely, it’s not going to get through Getty. It’s not going to hit the market.
Q: What have been the most important shots?
A: I’d go back to the plane crash.
Q: What about the funniest shot? Best story?
A: The one I loved from last summer was the picture of Zinedine Zidane, the French football captain. Just a shot of him smoking a cigarette on the eve of the World Cup semifinal. When we initially saw these pictures, I was very dubious about them. It was Zidane and three other members of the French team. They were staying in a hotel and they were on a sort of glassed-in balcony. So they’re behind glass, having a private moment, one of them was naked and Zidane was puffing away on a Marlboro. The shots were taken by an office worker who was working opposite the hotel and was able to look down upon this scene, saw Zidane having a fag and took a picture. And that by any definition is just a paparazzi shot. The guy, you would argue, has some kind of reasonable expectation of privacy in those circumstances. However, we found out that Zidane had actually spearheaded an anti-smoking campaign in the previous World Cup, called something like “Kick smoking out of football.” Now that’s a news story there. Suddenly this picture has gone from being paparazzi and untouchable to an absolutely legitimate news story. The guy had it coming. So we pushed that out to market and that sold very widely in the UK and elsewhere. It got very complicated for various reasons because the photographer had emailed it to all his mates and they had emailed their own mates. The picture had gone a little viral. So there’s us trying to control the licensing of this picture and it's already spreading round the world. But we managed to get a really good deal for the photographer.
Q: Anything more sensational than that? The best photo you couldn’t use?
A: If you were to do a search for “Out-Law” and “Scoopt” you would find a radio interview I did for them before acquisition. (MacRae discusses that subject here.)
Another example. Just last week — this again shows the potential — there was a news report that there was a helicopter flying a high-powered business executive back from football game in the north of England that had disappeared. Nobody knew where it was. I was talking to my editor at Getty Images and the reports that he was getting were that it had come down in a part of the country called Peterboro, roughly, but no one knew where, and a crash site hadn’t been found. He didn’t have very many professional photographers in that part of the world and he asked, does Scoopt? Do we have anyone there? So as luck would have it, there was a guy I had been talking to the day before who was based in that area. So we gave him a phone and he got in his car and found the crash site, he and one other photographer from another local newspaper. They were the two who found this site before anybody, and he got some pictures of the helicopter. Now it’s a tragic story: The guy was killed and his son was killed with him. A pilot was killed as well. But as a simple news story, sometimes we get accused of ambulance chasing, but we were well ahead of the ambulances in this story. That again got the guy a couple front pages and made him a fair amount of money. For us as a news resource, this is what it's all about. Getty is in competition with every broadcast and every newspaper to get the story of the day and this was it, and they managed to get it through Scoopt. That’s what this is all about. That’s why Getty acquired Scoopt. That’s why I get excited about the news potential of this business.
Q: What do you think the next phase of crowdsourcing will look like? Positive?
A: I don’t see any utopia in the short or long term. I think that the floodgates are already open and there’s no switching them off. Blogs started that. Citizen journalism has continued it. Wikipedia, and any number of initiatives you can point to, show the power of the crowd, and there’s no turning back. The real challenge is always going to be making sense of a mass of information. I don’t want to read a mass of information about every news story. What I would love to read is a well-edited, condensed, well-written, punchy compelling summary of what the story is all about. And that end report that I want to read as a reader should draw from as many sources as possible. And that goes well beyond just a professional journalist sitting in a newsroom. That embraces the crowd and as many reports and opinions and witness accounts as you can possibly get. But getting from that, opening the floodgates and saying, “What do you think?” and coming up with a punchy report that distills it and summarizes it, is a hard thing to do. It’s hard for us even dealing with newsworthy pictures. As I indicated, we get a flood of content and we have to cherry pick. But what if you start doing that with news and opinion? That filtering process is tough. I actually think that the Assignment Zero approach to this is probably the best I’ve seen simply because it’s so open. And Jay (Rosen) in particular saying, "We don’t know what’s going to work here. We don’t know how this is going to pan out. We don’t know how to control it, what the best model is. But let’s give it a bash and hopefully, at the end of it, the experiment will work and some kind of workable business model will come out of it." I just think that’s spot on.
Just talking about Scoopt again here. There’s quite a lot of internal debate between Scoopt and Getty about how this relationship works. Although we’re now wholly owned by Getty Images, the Scoopt brand is separate. They’re keeping it at arms length and they want to do that. The intent is to grow Scoopt as an arms-length business that has its own identity and is not just another arm or filter into Getty, but has its own identity. That is something. Obviously, I’m very keen that we’ve managed to do that. I think the Scoopt brand can have its own value removed from Getty Images, or what Getty Images brings to the table. Here is the scale that we just couldn’t build on our own. And that’s great for selling valuable newsworthy content, an unparalleled, brilliant deal. But there’s probably more that we can do with Scoopt itself as a dot com, as a web-based business that doesn’t tie in or feed into Getty, and that’s something we’re very very keen to develop.
Q: You’re free to develop some alternative platforms?
A: Yes, the way it's structured at the moment, it’s completely open. Getty is giving us a completely free hand. We’re redesigning the Web site at the moment and there are no controls or restrictions in that whatsoever. They want to see it as a separate business. Getty Images is not a consumer-facing business at all. It’s a B2B organization and Scoopt has to be consumer facing, we’re reaching out to the public — anybody with a cell phone or a camera. That’s a very very different type of business. What happens after the event and the pictures come in, that’s where Getty (comes in), that’s their strength. But to get it, that’s where you need a Scoopt more than a Getty Images.
There is an interesting parallel here, but on a much different level, with iStockphoto. Getty bought them last year. iStock is very much its own identity, its own brand, its own business and run remotely from Calgary with very little direct connection with Getty at all. And it's extremely successful on a much much bigger scale than Scoopt. I think the acquisition model is broadly the same here. Keep the brands distinct. Let them grow, let them develop and Getty just benefits from the back end, from the content.
Q: Is there wisdom in crowds?
A: That’s an interesting one. There’s certainly opinion in the crowds. And I guess, when you do open the floodgates, we’ve seen a little bit of this with ScooptWords, the blogging, where we’re trying to solicit the best blog writing out there. (We see) an awful lot of opinion. A lot of it is just homogeneous and, frankly, dull stuff, and I think you’ll always find that. As soon as you appeal to the crowd, you’re going to find this mass of uniformity and dull, sheep-like opinion sharing. However, within that, there is real wisdom, but it's probably a tiny minority of your potential contributors who are going to have that wisdom. To get to that, I think you have to invite the crowd in and then you have to filter, and that brings back this whole challenge. With Scoopt here and the pictures, we want the helicopter crash picture of the day. That’s what we really want. But to get that, we have to have twenty thousand, two-hundred thousand, two million members sending in anything and everything that they think has value, even if it really doesn’t. That’s the only way to get to the real wisdom, the real nuggets. I suspect that will hold true in any crowdsourcing model, in any business whatsoever. I don’t know if there’s a 95/5 rule or 70/30 or 99.5/.5, but I’m pretty convinced that the wisdom is concentrated in a very small number. Getting to that is an important, but not an easy, thing to do.
Q: Do you have any examples of wisdom in crowds?
A: One that I mentioned was The Guardian's Comment is Free, because as a resource, it is truly compelling. The Guardian readership is fairly high brow anyway, so you’re starting off at a fairly high level. So if you have a good writer, a good journalist writing an interesting article for The Guardian, you might read it and think, “Great article.” You then dive into the 250 comments and actually, that’s where the real interest is. The debating the argument, the conversation around the article, that’s fascinating.
Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail would work as an example of this. (He's an) editor of Wired, or ex-editor. The Long Tail (concept) is, well, it's become a sort of business model now. The way it started is, he had an idea, he put it on a blog and he threw it out to the crowd and said, “I think the real value in selling any kind of commodity is not the hits, not the top 10 best seller list on Amazon. It’s the other hundreds of thousands of titles that (they) sell one, two, three, ten (copies) of. And look at it, the long tail of this parabola, that’s where the real money is. And then he threw it out, invited the crowd in. His idea got challenged, got refined. He thought it through, improved it, and at the end of it what he did very very well, and successfully, is he distilled all of this knowledge and input into a very very good book. And that is the challenge of filtering. He did it very well. Ultimately he was the author, but I think he’d be the first to acknowledge that a lot of the good ideas and examples came from his audience. All free, nobody got paid for it. Chris Anderson presumably made several million dollars of the sales. So you could look at that slightly cynically. Get the mucks to write your book for you, and then tour the world on a book tour. But he was open about it, and it was ultimately quite a good book that was a collaborative project.
Q: What surprised you the most in this venture?
A: I guess the biggest surprise overall was the readiness of mainstream media to accept this kind of content — and to embrace it, not just accept it. They’ve always used amateur content, you can point to the examples: the JFK assassination, the Concord crash, the LAPD example. But when I was watching the tsunami footage on CNN, that was obviously a once-in-a-lifetime massive event, as was the London chute bombings that occurred on the 7th of July, three days after we launched. Those kind of events are earth-shattering, massive events, and any kind of footage, any kind of amateur content there is going to be valuable.
But the big question for me was, what about everything else, what about the day-to-day stories? Can we really compete, is there really a market for this? And it has been very surprising and gratifying to find that there is. The media is ready to accept this. It is ready to reach out. It’s ready to broaden its understanding of what the news is, to move away, perhaps, from just covering events that they know are going to happen, to move slightly away from that model and just wing it and see what comes in from the agencies and from punters, and make that part of the news feed on a daily basis. And this has all happened very quickly. I guess where it threatened to kill us was last year when everybody, every broadcast, every newspaper, every publisher opened the doors themselves and said, “Hey send us your content.” The BBC suddenly went from being a customer to being a direct competitor with Scoopt, as did everybody else. The Sun newspaper, by far the best selling paper in the UK, they launched their own (they didn’t call it citizen journalism). They said, "We pay the best prices on Fleet Street. Send us your pictures, your videos, your news tips and we’ll pay you good money." Now The Sun was our best customer, and suddenly they’re competing for the same kind of audience share. And that was a point where I thought, this has actually gone much faster and much further than I imagined it would. And our whole runway for success was suddenly very very much foreshortened and we had to scale, we had to get to the point where we could actually compete. That focused us.
In the very early days, when the company was three weeks old, we got a phone call from Sony Ericsson who said, "Do you want to be in our next generation of camera phones?" And I fell off my chair. How the hell did Sony Ericsson know about us? We hadn’t issued a press release, we hadn’t done anything at all, but they were looking for a market. They knew a year from then, they’d be launching the Cybershot phones, a 3.2 megapixel camera, and they wanted to sell them on the basis of the quality of the camera, so they saw value in doing something with them. So we did a deal with them. They embedded Scoopt in their cameras and that was an incredible deal for us.
Around about the same time, we did start getting solicited by the Silicon Valley VCs (venture capitalists), who were all looking at this space, all looking ahead. And then Scoopt, we were first to market, we got a lot of buzz and there was this interesting little company which was based in Scotland, which they’d never heard of, and they did court us. We met a few of them and they were very interested in where we were going. Unfortunately, the type of VCs that were approaching us were way too big or we were way too small. We had to get to an altogether different level of trading before they would get on board. So what we then had to do was spend way too much time trying to put together small investment packages and working with business angels and government funding and all the rest. And that, we just couldn’t get it together. If we were manufacturing semiconductors in Scotland it would have been easy, but here this was a media business trying to compete on the global stage and it was too big and too scary for the early stage investors. And yet we were too small for the big VCs, so we got into a fairly awkward position there. I learned an awful lot in that process. In hindsight, I actually think we were right not to take the VC route because I don’t think it would have gotten us what a Getty Images gets us, which is the sales scale. You could have built the consumer brand, taken out the Super Bowl adverts, and everybody would have known about Scoopt, and (we would have) gotten a mass of content, but we would never have been able to sell it without at least a strategic partner. It panned OK in the end. As a learning experience, absolutely.
(Edited by Jeremy Verdusco)
