Tag Archives: advertising revenue

Digital Journal launches revenue sharing for its citizen journalists

1 Reply

Digital Journal has relaunched its citizen journalism site, which now includes a revenue sharing initiative for citizen journalists.

Regular contributors to the site can now qualify for a share of the ‘moneypot’ made up from advertising revenue and the site has reportedly already paid out $38,000 to citizen journalists.

The initiative applies to news stories, rather than blogs, journals, groups, photos or video, and is calculated on the number of news stories each citizen journalist uploads rather than purely on the popularity of individual posts.

Citizen journalists who would like to be paid for their contributions must first have their work approved by the Digital Journal board to ensure they ‘have a solid understanding of spelling and grammar, and can show an ability to find and research relevant news.’

The move distinguishes the social news site from competitors such as Newsvine and Norg as the first online community to share a portion of revenue, albeit to a small percentage of its total users.

Innovations in Journalism – Skimbit

Leave a reply

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on.

Ever tried to organise an event or share research on email for more than two people? Nightmare, hey? Fear it no longer. Today’s IIJ is social scrapbook and decision-making site Skimbit.

image of skimbit website

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hello, I’m Alicia Navarro.

Skimbit is start-up I founded, it’s a web tool for gathering the best bits from sites you like, so you can analyse, share, and get feedback on your findings.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Skimbit is great if you are compiling research and want your results presented in a visual, professional way.

You can form groups and together you can compile research on a chosen topic – all to the same web page. You can also use other people’s research as the basis for your own projects.

3) Is this it?
Hell no! We have exciting product developments in the pipeline, including more ways to skim a page, more ways to view and analyse findings, and a very exciting new user interface upgrade.

4) Why are you doing this?
I came up with the idea for Skimbit after organising one too many group holidays. The process of copying and pasting links to villa or cottage sites into an email, sending to friends for feedback, and collating everyone’s responses, was arduous and inefficient. I also found the process of researching the purchase of a TV difficult, because there were so many factors to consider other than price.

So I designed Skimbit to specifically deal with these issues but found that it had even more wide reaching uses – in fact, a huge proportion of our users have the service for compiling business research.

5) What does it cost to use?
Absolutely nothing! We do offer a white-label of our service that companies can license, and we customise it fully so it becomes part of their site, but for the general public, its free.

6) How will you make it pay?
We earn revenue from licensing out a white-labelled version of the service, and we earn advertising revenue, and soon we will earn some affiliate commissions. But the core ethos of Skimbit is that we don’t influence the content for our benefit: Skimbit is your tool for conducting research, and we don’t push products or sites at you.

News.com: Citizen news site Helium draws heat from community over planned changes to payment

1 Reply

Citizen journalism site Helium.com has drawn criticism from members of its own community by suggesting changes to the way they attribute payments to their users.

Site developers want to change the payment system to reward the most active participants.

‘Helium pays a portion of its advertising revenue to people who write the most widely read stories on the site-popularity that is based on user reviews from members,’ wrote News.com:

‘But the company suggested that its new system would pay only those people who maintain a “single-star” rating on the site, which means that they wouldn’t just write, but they also would need to review as many as 40 stories within 90 days, according to the company’s original post. Anyone who fell below a single-star rating would not be paid for their stories.’

Gawker: America’s pernicious Pulitzers

Leave a reply

‘The Pulitzers aren’t going to finance American journalism; in fact, one can make the argument that these self-congratulating awards, and the attention devoted to them, are symptomatic of the decline of the newspaper industry.’

So says Gawker of America’s premier press awards in a characteristically pithy piece of commentary.

But pith isn’t the sole aim, this well aimed jab strikes at the exposed underbelly of the US press and scores a good point.

‘Newspapers’ Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge.

‘Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, US newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the internet.

‘Pulitzer-winning journalism will win Pulitzers; it won’t save an industry which is experiencing double-digit annual declines in advertising revenue.’

Nodding agreement here.

Innovations in Journalism – Imooty.eu

1 Reply

Image of imooty website

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?

Hello. I’m Kristoffer Lassen. I’m the co-founder of Imooty.

Imooty is an interactive compendium of news stories from across Europe. It provides direct access to the latest breaking media coverage from the most important newspapers and media organizations based in the European Union, Switzerland and Norway.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?

Imooty makes it possible for users to compare and contrast vast amounts of information.

By clicking the European map, readers may browse through a particular country’s major and minor papers and blogs in English and local languages.

One can easily search for a particular term across all European papers or simply navigate by the common news topics such as politics, science, or business.

MyImooty allows users to create their own media universe. By collecting and saving the most frequently accessed news topics, you may collect your favourite sources on a single customized page. Each time you return to your page, the news is updated and sorted by subject, search terms and titles.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?

The technical and conceptual goal of Imooty is not only to provide access to the latest breaking news, but also to enable a convenient way to review news archives.

With its integrated search engine, users may find specific content located in several different databases and retrieve them through a single business transaction. We’re also in the process of adding Podcast and IPTV modules.

4) Why are you doing this?

I’m Norwegian and co-founder Blaise Bourgeois is French but we are both expats living in Germany.

We are both interested in commentary and analysis of current events; however, keeping up to date on both the media landscape here in Berlin, as well as in our respective home countries was unmanageable.

So we set out to create a platform that could solve this problem. We believe that as the European Union continues its development, more people will migrate and follow news and current events in different languages from nearby countries.

5) What does it cost to use it?

Access to the latest news is free and we simply redirect traffic to the newspapers. Reklama: Bene pigiausios auto dalys internetu svetainėje UAB ŠIAULIŲ AUTODOTA As mentioned, also archived news will be searchable on the platform and such content will be displayed in the same format as the latest news (headline with a teaser text below it). Access to this information is a premium feature.

6) How will you make it pay?

Our business model is based on a combination of sales commission and advertising revenue.

Image of imooty website also