Top Editorial Contributors Get a Share of Demotix’s Ad Revenues

Posted: January 27, 2012

[caption id="attachment_9641" align="alignright" width="498"]DemotixImage: Demotix[/caption] might just have created a new revenue model for editorial photographers and aspiring photojournalists. The crowd-sourced news agency, which has licensed images to publications and outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and the BBC, is to begin paying contributors a share of its advertising revenue.

The company has partnered with Guardian Select, MessageSpace and Google to place ads on all the site’s story pages and news hubs. Demotix will work with the advertising agencies to make sure that the ads are relevant and ethical, and the photographers will receive an 80 percent share of the revenue generated by the ads on their pages.

Demotix was launched in 2008 by CEO Turi Munthe, a journalist who had worked for The Economist, Slate and the Financial Times among others, and his fellow Oxford University alumnus Jonathan Tepper whose background was in finance. The aim was to promote citizen journalism around the world as a replacement for the decline in foreign news desks. The company received praise for its ability to distribute images during the 2008-2009 Gaza conflict, when accredited journalists were excluded from the region, and in July 2009 Demotix received the only image of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates as he was arrested for disorderly conduct. Prices for licenses are set at rights managed rates rather than royalty free microstock fees. An exclusive can sell for over $6,000, of which Demotix takes half as its commission. In March 2011, the company signed a deal with Corbis which now helps distributes Demotix’s images to its clients.

The new plan is intended to supplement image sales and to provide a way to monetize non-buying users who visit the site in search of news content.

“Many of what we consider our very best stories are not picked up by mainstream media,” explains Tom Barfield, Demotix’s community manager. “As traffic to Demotix grew, we began to realise we were becoming a news outlet in our own right, and that we could monetise this through advertising. That, finally, gives us the possibility of rewarding those extraordinary stories that nobody has bought but that make Demotix as varied and wonderful as it is.”

Top Photographers Only

The ad revenue won’t be paid to all contributors however. Demotix currently has 25,000 registered users of which 5,000 are active. Demotix will only share advertising revenue with the 100 photographers who have brought in the most unique visitors.

“We want to be paying out a usable amount of money,” says Tom Barfield “We have a very long tail which means that any other revenue-sharing model would result in thousands of payouts of fractions of pennies.”

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