AllVoices, the US-based site that describes itself as ‘the leading source for credible citizen reporting’ has raised $9m in funding overall since its birth in 2007, with the latest $3 million from VantagePoint Venture Partners (as earlier reported by paidContent / TechCrunch).

Forthcoming plans include focusing on developing hyperlocal and global markets, COO Aki Hashmi has told Journalism.co.uk, without going into detail.

It was hard to raise capital at first, he said, “because everywhere you turned there were stories about the death of journalism, coupled with the economic downturn. But, we were lucky; we have great metrics, a model that scales and series A investors who believe in our vision.”

Hashmi attributed the site’s success – TechCrunch reports it has five million unique visitors a month – to its 275,000 reporters, “who have become great evangelist for our service,” he said. It’s the “social aspect of our service,” that helps, he said. “When people create reports they want to share their content with their network.”

“Readers are seeking an alternative voice to mainstream media and our system does a great job in optimising content so that it can be easily found by search engines.

“Keep in mind we are an open platform where anyone can get instantly published and develop a reputation based on their content, activity and report validation based on our technology.”