IP Democracy: Everyone's a Stringer Now

Everyone is a citizen journalist in the making and Reuters and Yahoo! have teamed to give the photos and videos of the general public a wider circulation. Starting tomorrow, Yahoo! will kick off You Witness News, a site where users can submit videos and photos.

All of the photos will appear on Yahoo-owned Flickr and a similar site for video. Editors from Reuters will then review the submissions and place selected ones on pages with relevant news articles. In the future, Reuters will actually circulate the images and videos to their member newspaper and news organizations for inclusion in articles. Reuters is also toying with the idea of setting up separate web sites that consist of nothing but the submitted content.

From a business perspective, this is a flying leap into the unknown — no immediate bottom-line impact is obvious from the alliance. Yahoo!, however, has the possibility of generating more ad revenue from the additional content and Reuters gets a richer online service and one more thing to keep its paying newspapers and magazines happy.

A similar alliance between Yahoo! and Current TV, called the Yahoo! Current Network, formed only two months ago, sputtered to an end last week. That venture had intended to accept user-generated videos with the idea that some of them might make it to Current’s regular cable channel. As of now, a message appears on the site that says “We are no longer accepting uploads to the Yahoo! Current Network.”

It’s possible that Yahoo!’s deal with Reuters spelled the end for Yahoo! Current Network, or it’s possible, as Rafat Ali suggests, that the site generated little interest, traffic or submissions.

One other possibility: YouTube is so dominant in the user-generated video category, including video that might be newsworthy, that users won’t think to go anywhere else to submit content.

“The average person witnesses something that is considered news once every 10 years,” said Steve Rosenbaum, who created MTV Unfiltered, one of the first viewer-contributed video programs on television. “When it’s time to put something on the Internet, they will put it in the place they have used before. The numbers tell us that is YouTube.”

In any event, the Yahoo!-Reuters venture doesn’t entail a lot of costs, yet. Users don’t get paid and Reuters is paying Yahoo! nothing for the portal. That will change once Reuters starts submitting the video to its member companies — at that point, users will get paid for their content and Yahoo! and Reuters will share revenues.

Yahoo! could use a hit in the original content department (if that’s what user-generated videos could be considered). Yahoo!’s efforts to beef up its content offerings as the portal tries to remake itself into a media company under the leadership of former ABC president Lloyd Braun haven’t paid off yet. Last week, Yahoo!’s media group pushed out top entertainment and sports executive David Katz. Katz didn’t oversee the Current/Yahoo! ventures, but he was in charge of a unit called Yahoo! Studios, an arm of Yahoo! charged with the creation of original content.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on December 4, 2006 6:55 AM to IP Democracy