As the situation in Gaza continues to worsen, a new type of picture agency is demonstrating how the future of news coverage is set to work, direct from the front line.
Demotix is described by TechCrunch UK as "a new startup coming out of London" that takes a "pretty interesting approach to reinventing the newswire… If you ever wanted to know what life and death was like on the ground in the middle of a war, this is it."
Pretty much anybody can upload photos or videos that they feel are newsworthy to the Demotix website, keeping the copyright to their pics and vids and the right to remove it from the site at any time.
An interesting new biz model
Content providers will pay anything between $150- $3,000 for non-exclusive images and $500-$1,000/minute for video
Demotix then shares 50 percent of the revenue from each sale with the person who contributed the content.
It's an interesting business model and English and Arabic versions of the site is currently running in beta phase. TechRadar will be keeping an eye on this to monitor its progress over the coming months.
Take pics, make money
CEO and former journalist Turi Munthe launched the site as a response to what he calls "Churnism" or "re-publishing AP or Reuters-like wire stories and pulling journalists out of the world's hot-spots because they are just too expensive to run."
In fact, we may just get a flight straight over to Gaza to try out our new digital camera we got for Christmas, to see if we can make any money. Then again, perhaps not…
