7. Scoopshot: Pulling the Scoop on the Trendy Photo Crowdsourcing Platform
Context
This is not the first time that Mr. Petri Rahja, the founder and CEO of Scoopshot, has launched a technology start-up company. Petri has a background in IT, IPR, and mobile technology. As a result, when he was working on a documentary of photographers and their attempts to get themselves into media companies, he was quite surprised by the shortcomings of traditional media. The inefficiency of photography was one of them. Rahja found the whole process to be incredibly slow and time-consuming. It didn’t take him long to come up with an idea to make the world a better place, through efficient photography.
With the help of a few technology gurus, he developed the first functional app of “Scoopshot,” a trendy photo crowdsourcing service. The interest of some angel investors accelerated the development and final concept design. In February 2011, 9 months from the initial date, Petri launched the product. Within the first 6 months of business, Scoopshot had generated €120,000 in revenue. It was a matter of a few months before Scoopshot went international by entering Sweden and Denmark (November 2011) and the Netherlands (January 2012). By then, it had 282,000 photos in its system and a total of about 100,000 photographers who shoot news photography on-scene. Since then, Scoopshot has been opening the doors of press photography to common people1 in 165 countries. As of November 2013, it had received a funding of $11 million in three rounds from three investors.
1But laymen are not the only members of Scoopshot. This is discussed later on in the article.
WOW: Photography for Everyone—Everyone’s a Photographer
So, what exactly is Scoopshot? Scoopshot is a disruptive technology, which provides a platform for photography. It is an international crowdsourcing facility for photography, which connects media, brands, and news organizations with mobile photographers around the world. The basic idea is to give people an opportunity to make money for a thing they are already doing, i.e., taking pictures using their smartphone’s camera.
According to Business Insider, one in every five persons worldwide owns a smartphone. This has led to a phenomenal increase in the number of photographs taken around the globe. Statistics show that in 2013 alone, approximately 400 billion photographs were taken throughout the world. This is where Scoopshot enters.
Scoopshot photographers, known as “Scoopshooters,” can upload unique, authenticated photos and video content to the Scoopshot app and send it to the global market in minutes. In today’s world where authentication of content is an increasingly big worry, Scoopshot stands out with its app-based solution that verifies the location and camera that the picture was taken with.
The photographers are rewarded for uploading exciting pictures or for responding to “tasks” or photo assignments. These assignments range from product as well as background photos for advertisement campaigns to pictures of current events for newspapers. Currently, 600,000 smartphone users are registered to Scoopshot. Brands, organizations, bloggers, and ad agencies make use of Scoopshot to generate content.
Strategies: SO WHAT Makes Scoopshot Worth a Shot?
Media companies are always on the shoot out for unique content. According to the former CEO Mr. Niko Ruokosuo, Scoopshot feeds this demand as well as developing engagement, all through the same platform at a low price. Scoopshot is free and anyone with a smart phone can download it, create an account, and use it. Through this account they upload their pictures to appropriate categories or assigned tasks. These pictures are browsed and, if found to be newsworthy, purchased by customers (publishers, editors, marketers, strategists, etc.). Scoopshot receives a cut of all sales.
As on July 2013, 100 media publications around the world were using Scoopshot, a figure that has continued to increase quarter over quarter. Scoopshot takes care of all the copyright, payment, image authenticity, and transfer concerns. Additionally, unlike in the case of Facebook or Instagram, Scoopshot does not require the users to grant over the rights to use the photographs anyway they see fit. The platform merely acts as a broker between the photographer and the buyer.
Indeed, Scoopshot stresses that the photographer is still the owner of the picture. Nobody can use a picture without purchasing a license. The members can select either “license to use” or “license to own” for each of the photos they upload. In the case of a “license to own” holder, nobody else can use, publish, sell, or offer to sell the concerned picture without his or her permission. But the “license to own” holder has unlimited, exclusive rights to forward, modify, publish, or use the photo in any media around the globe. Of course, the moral rights of the photographer will stay intact, as they are guaranteed under copyright laws. The sold photos are marked “sold” with the exception of the exclusive pictures, which are marked “exclusive.”
Scoopshooters receive both recognition and financial rewards (someone made as much as 25,000 USD by selling his pictures!!) as they give the world a view of the real world in real time. But photographers are not the only ones satisfied with Scoopshot. Marketers and strategists utilize the services of Scoopshot to reduce their reliance stock photography and visual research costs. Brands like Oxfam, Malibu, Fiat, and Vogel’s are already using Scoopshot to source photos on demand. In the case of publishers and editors, Scoopshot provides an exclusive set of tools for discovering, assigning, and authenticating relevant pictures, allowing clients to progress from concept to content in a matter of minutes. Unsurprisingly, Scoopshot won the best mobile service award at Grand One and also ended up in Flurry’s Top 20 World’s Best Apps list in SXSW.
How Is Scoopshot a Positive Outlier?
Scoopshot is a disruptive innovation, which has marked its entry into the $4 billion stock photo business. According to Mr. Ruokosuo, “on-demand photography” will be a game changer for the photo industry. He claims that the majority of stock photography will transition to an “on-demand” model in the next few years. Adapting to these new models requires new ways of monetizing photography.
Furthermore, Scoopshot is quite different from its incumbents and a pioneer in the field with regards to its strategy. For example, consider Getty Images, the incumbent company that caters to photography needs of media and companies, just like Scoopshot. The difference between the two models lies in the fact that Getty Images creates a pool of images expecting to match a demand (i.e., an offer-first marketplace). This is a difficult, expensive model, which requires substantial infrastructure. Scoopshot, on the other hand, caters to the quick and easy demand-first marketplace for photographs. Here customers reach out to photographers who could satisfy their specific photography needs. This second model requires substantially less infrastructure. The success of Scoopshot is so remarkable that even incumbent companies are testing the demand-first model. In February 2014, Getty Images beta tested an app called Moment, quite similar to Scoopshot.
Even when compared to other disruptive innovators in the field (e.g., Foap), Scoopshot stands out as the only company with a patented authentication technology to verify the photos. The embedded GPS data provides additional verification of the location of the photograph. In this way, Scoopshot eliminates the possibility of manipulated or filtered images masquerading as fresh and newsworthy content. This is quite significant as this saves the staff-time companies spend on trying to authenticate a photo or video. In some cases, even after such efforts, it would lead to embarrassing results. An example being the newspaper El Pais (Caracas, Venezuela), which published a fake photo of President Hugo Chavez undergoing medical treatment in Cuba. This earned the company a lot of criticism and resulted in monetary losses.
The Scoopshot app also has instant payment and rights management capabilities which none of its rivals have. Foap, for instance, has yet to come up with an airtight copyright policy like Scoopshot’s. Scoopshot is also one of the pioneer agencies that work with smartphone-owning amateurs who happen to be at the right place at the right time, in contrast to other agencies that cater to only professional photographers. In an interview with the senior writer for Gigaom, David Meyer, Scoopshot CEO asserted
“Nobody has the features that we do to do this correctly . . . and the way we keep track of our users—we can send assignments that are location-based and immediate—[this] provides results more effectively than anybody else can do.”
Nonetheless, this does not mean Scoopshot overlooks professional photographers. Scoopshot Pro is a new service offered exclusively for professional photographers. It helps professionals receive photo assignments from the media based on their location. Consequently it provides more work opportunities, more demanding assignments, and more visibility to photographers, while taking care of contracts and payments too.
Challenges
Scoopshot marks the birth of on-demand photography and facilitates convenient transactions between buyers and makers of user-submitted photos. However, this also includes a risk factor. According to Scoopshot’s terms of service, as long as the photo is in the service of Scoopshot, it controls all given rights to the photo. It maintains “exclusive rights” to the photographs for 48 hours, and if not purchased within that period of time, some of the rights are returned to the photographer. It does not, however, take care of the photographer’s long-term rights to the photos.
Another noteworthy aspect is the tax consequences of the revenue made by the Scoopshooters. For Finnish users, Scoopshot withholds appropriate taxes for tax documentation. However, for users from other countries, the company does not provide any assistance. Then again, this is typically a problem for professional photographers or people who earn large amounts of money. For casual photographers who make small amounts, this may not be an issue until earnings increase.
Outlook
The fact that neither the founder of Scoopshot nor its original collaborators had any media experience is a classic example of how detached, outside thinking and vision could lead to innovations. The key idea behind Scoopshot is quite simple. The brilliance of this simplicity might be what encouraged Scoopshot to disrupt a field dominated by “old fashioned minds.” By creating a convergence of photography, technology, and leveraging customers to pay for the content, Scoopshot is achieving the scale needed to compete with incumbents like Getty. As Mr. Ruokosuo and founder Petri Rahja, the current CEO, envision, Scoopshot might indeed turn out to be known as the iTunes of the photo industry one day.
From the Perspective of Lakshmi B. Nair, a Scoopshooter
From a User’s Perspective
As a person whose favorite hobby is taking snapshots of anything and everything around, it was inevitable that I would become a member of Scoopshot the moment I heard about it. I have been one since September 2014. And I have to say, the experience is really worth a shot. It is quite simple, you download the app, register yourself, and start (or resume) clicking! The beauty of the whole concept (apart from the prospect of a potential customer finding your masterpiece worth buying) is its simplicity. It helps you make money out of something you are already doing, by creating an online marketplace which brings together potential customers (newspapers, companies, whoever is interested in paying for a genuine, exclusive first-hand photograph) and Scoopshooters.
As a user, there are several aspects that I like about Scoopshot. It is easy to use and efficient. So you take a picture or a video with your phone and upload it with a description on the website, using the app. You can fix your own price for your work (who knows better than you?!) and keep waiting for the offers to arrive. Alternatively, you upload content which corresponds to customer assignments (photos, videos, eyewitness reports) and let the customers take their pick. In this case, the customers fix the price, and you can decide whether the offered fee is appealing enough for you. What’s more, Scoopshot also has several photo contests, where users can post pictures, and the winners are selected based on the number of votes each picture receives. In all these scenarios, after you post your picture or video, there is nothing more you have to worry about. Scoopshot takes care of everything, and that includes the legal arrangements of the posted content. For each sold image, Scoopshot receives a 30 percent share, which is considerably lower than the commission charged by other services.
As a customer, when you post an assignment or campaign online, you know that you will get the best value. You get a vast assortment of content to choose from, and the authentication technology ensures the pictures or videos you get are genuine, unique, and “fresh.” This makes sure that companies and brands have access to time-sensitive and location-specific content, without having to avail of the services of a photographer.
From an External Commenter’s Perspective
I find the company quite an “outlier” in terms of its strategic novelty, impact, amplification, etc. Unlike traditional stock photography platforms, Scoopshot is strategically novel with its demand-specific, crowdsourcing business model, which connects photographers with buyers (especially, media). It innovates the stock photography industry by providing “on-demand” services to its customers. This would change the photography industry as well as cause huge ripple effects such as innovation in multiple industries like journalism, advertising, etc.
In today’s economy, when companies are trying to cut costs, Scoopshot offers an alternative for media where they can purchase the desired content without actually having to send someone out there to get it. Spatial and temporal constraints won’t matter anymore. You will get what you need faster, and you get multiple options to choose from. This could be how the future will look like.