A new site of user-submitted photos wants to give back to the online community by sharing ad revenue with contributors. DigitalJournal.com has learned fOTOGLIF will launch publicly tomorrow, marking another milestone for citizen media.
Digital Journal — As more user-generated content begins to gain popularity on Web 2.0 sites, entrepreneurs are hoping to give back to everyday content creators. We’ve seen it with news sites, video hubs and now photography is the latest resource to offer revenue-sharing possibilities.
DigitalJournal.com has learned tomorrow will bring the beta launch of fOTOGLIF, marking the beginning of a trend valuable to both photographers and online publications: fOTOGLIF allows shutterbugs to upload an unlimited amount of pics in order to share them with friends or create slideshows. The site’s main appeal rests in what it wants to give back: its widget allows other sites to embed fOTOGLIF photos, tracking how often it is viewed, and then calculating how much ad revenue goes to the photographer. Essentially, photographers get more money when more sites use their photos.
“We want our members to benefit from the advanced sharing of their content,” says Mike Betts, CEO of Digisphere Technologies, creator of fOTOGLIF, in an interview with DigitalJournal.com. “You just share as wide and far as you can and we reward the user for the depth with which they share the content.”
Betts says the site takes half of the ad revenue generated by a particular photo and gives the other half to the user. Users get paid via PayPal.
The fOTOGLIF widget accompanies every photo used on other sites, similar to how you see a YouTube player for embedded video. For now, no advertising travels with the widget but Betts hints a future development will bring unobtrusive ads to photos wherever they land.
Until then, here’s how the money thing works:
fOTOGLIF will share 50 per cent of its revenue with you based on how much traffic you bring to the site. So, for example, if fOTOGLIF brings in $10,000 in ad revenue in a month, it gives 50 per cent of that back to users based on how much traffic (essentially pageviews) their images pulled in. It doesn’t matter if pageviews came from fOTOGLIF’s website or from a third-party site where a slideshow is embedded; fOTOGLIF will calculate total image pageviews for the site, and find out what percentage of those pageviews came from your images. If your images pulled in 10 per cent of the site’s total image count, you get paid 10 per cent of the 50 per cent split of ad revenue fOTOGLIF sets aside for users.
But why should photographers flock to this recently-launched site? Betts cites several benefits, first among them an innovative zooming feature rarely seen on other sites. “It’s a great way to be able to show incredibly high-resolution detail without disproportionately large photos taking over your entire monitor,” Betts notes.
Also, the financial incentive should be an attractive lure for photographers who want to be compensated for their work.
“You can go ahead and upload photos to flickr, it’s a fantastic service,” Betts says. “But uploading to fOTOGLIF gives you a chance to reap the benefits of a slideshow going viral.”
Betts wants to see user-generated content, commonly called crowd-sourcing, elevate to a level where news outlets turn to citizen media content as a viable resource. He mentions a recent downtown fire in Toronto where many national publications relied on normal residents snapping photos of the blaze from their digi-cams or cellphones.
What motivated Betts to get fOTOGLIF off the ground? “I’ve seen how user-generated content is some of the most trafficked content on the Web,” he says. “But users get very little back, and I’d like to see a shift where they got some money for their hard work.”
After months of beta testing, the site already has 10,000 photos for bloggers and online publications to select. The fOTOGLIF viewer is best suited for large photos, Betts says, and there are no size or bandwidth restrictions for uploading pics.
Betts doesn’t plan on spending much on advertising to get the word out. Instead, he hopes the site spreads virally (one of Betts’ favourite words) as its incentive model gains momentum on the blogosphere.
By bringing a revenue-sharing idea to online images, fOTOGLIF wants to democratize how photos are being used on the Web. At the same time, the site has the noble intention of paying photographers for their work. In this era of citizen media, fOTOGLIF understands how active contributors no longer just want exposure; fair compensation is the new name of this online game.
See below for an example of fOTOGLIF’s widget with some images by DigitalJournal.com Editor-in-Chief, Chris Hogg who tested the site out before public launch tomorrow:
