demotix
Demotix, the citizen journalism site and photo agency, has launched a new site and user payment system.

The site - which has grown to 3,000 active contributors in 190 countries since launching in autumn 2008 - will now feature a video content, as well as a new ecommerce system.

"Every contributor will have a hidden page on their dashboard where they can see what has been sold, for how much, and when they'll be paid," CEO Turi Munthe explained.

"It will make their lives much simpler, and will make us much more transparent. Having it run automatically also simplifies our life tremendously."

Demotix says it can sell images for professional rates to mainstream media and other buyers, with 50 per cent going to the producer.

With the new site, there are also changes for buyers, Munthe said. For example, the URL structure of Demotix has been altered to make every image searchable outside of a story. This will make searching for images inside Demotix, and on the external web, much easier, he said.


He also hopes content commissioning will be simplified: "We've built a dead simple ecommerce sales platform which will allow anyone to licence Demotix imagery direct from the web. We get a lot of one-off queries for pictures that would be far more simply done automatically." The new process will be easier for buyers, and easier for Demotix, he adds.

Munthe expects the site's use of video to develop as its photo agency has: "Demotix has always been a word of mouth build, and video will be the same.

"We'll be reaching out to new video users in our key geographic areas, and we'll be trying to educate our current users to get into video, but we'll eventually - and shortly - be looking for interesting video partners too."

The first video features an interview with a journalist from Kazakhstan, discussing freedom of speech. It's appropriate, says Munthe, in a blog post, because "Demotix unashamedly stands for free speech and a democratised media". 

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