David Cohn
Spot.us founder David Cohn at the World Editors Forum. Image: NewspaperWorld on twitpic

"I still consider us a start-up. Some people say 'you're a year-and-a-half old now so forget it.'"

But with a full-time team of never more than three people and a founder who is part customer service, part developer and part public face, the "crowd-funded" news site Spot.us hasn't lost any of its startup roots - and its doesn't want to, the site's David Cohn told Journalism.co.uk at the World Editors Forum in Hamburg.

Spot.us, which won a grant from the Knight News Challenge in 2008, began in San Francisco, asking readers for small donations to fund pitches from journalists for local story ideas. The site has since expanded to cover Los Angeles and Seattle and inspired copycat launches in Australia and Italy and funded stories published by the New York Times and Mother Jones alongside a ream of local and online news sites.

Spot.us' own experiments with funding journalism are intended to benefit journalism as a whole by sparking new ideas and experiments by other organisations. But Cohn is clear: Spot.us is a news platform, not a news organisation.

"I want to keep our overheads as low as possible, which is why were not a traditional news organisation. We don't have reporters on staff. I think if we did have reporters on staff, I would have paid them a guaranteed salary and we probably would have burnt through the [grant] money a lot quicker," he says.

A recent meeting with the CEO of Betaworks, developers of products such as bit.ly, has made Cohn reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of being a startup in the news industry: "There is something to be said about staying mean and lean as a start-up and waiting for the market to catch up with you. When you have something where you're building from scratch, you're ahead of it, the audience isn't there and you have to wait it.

"The great part is when you do have an idea and you want to change something the debate is pretty minimal: you either go with your gut or go with what you're seeing and execute."

Recent ideas include the platform's latest revenue stream: community centred advertising, which asks users of Spot.us to take surveys for organisations or companies in exchange for money to be used as credit elsewhere on the site.

Large US organisations including Mortgage Revolution and the AARP have already used the sponsorship and a bluechip company is in line in the coming weeks. This is one of three revenue streams currently employed by the site (the other two being grant money and an option for donors to donate some of their pitch money to Spot.us) and the transparency behind it is what's exciting Cohn.

"I used to hate advertising and the idea of advertising and it shows in the original conception of Spot.us. But what I've realised is that the best kind of advertisements are ones that the customer or reader welcome and like, like coupons. It's much more transparent. Here's the advertisement, you're opting into it and you get a benefit from it," says Cohn.

"That's what I'd like to think the sponsorship model we're offering is: you get to benefit and support a story and it's very transparent. You know that you're being advertised to."

The survey option also reduces the barrier between people thinking they will donate to journalism through the site and the physical action of getting out their wallet, Cohn says. Donating to pitches, 1,000 visitors to the site will yield around 10 donations or a 1 per cent conversion rate; with the community sponsorship surveys take-up is around 10 per cent.

With the Knight News Challenge money still part of Spot.us' business model, how sustainable is it as a business? Cohn's goal is to wean the platform off major philanthropy and the site is coming close to being 30 per cent supported by the grant and 70 per cent from its own revenue streams, which of course include philanthropy on a smaller scale from individual users.

"My goal is to wean off major philanthropy, because when a [philanthropic] family gives large sums of money out to journalism (...) there's a message there that journalism can't be sustainable unless a millionaire gives out a million dollars. Knight News challenge gives seed money.

"In the long-term if Spot.us can't support itself without major philanthropic contributions then I sort of have to question why we're doing it in the first place."

As Cohn told delegates at the forum, first and foremost journalism needs rethinking as a business not as a craft. Spot.us is just one experiment amongst many that he says needs to be conducted for this to happen in the long-term. In the short-term, it's back to selling community sponsorships with his sales person hat on.

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