Scooplive and Cell Journalist Pay Cash for Your Cellphone Photos

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Two new startups entered the citizen journalism space this week, both of them vying to sell your cellphone photos to big media. Paris-based Scooplive is offering an auction system for cellphone snaps, while Cell Journalist wants to sell celebrity shots and photos of local events.

Neither service has been executed very well. Cell Journalist, for instance, is using a Slide photo viewer on their front page - there's something distinctly unprofessional about that. Once you log in, the experience doesn't improve much - the site is clunky and feels underdone. You can upload photos from your computer or email your pictures (from your computer or cellphone) to [email protected], with a revenue share of 50%.

Scooplive also lacks on the design and usability front, but their auction model is an interesting one. The revenue share is "up to" 85% and they ask for an exclusive worldwide license for three months. Once again, they prefer it if you upload your images from a computer, but you can also send an MMS to [email protected].

While I'm not blown away by either service, the only important metric is how many photos these guys can sell - to the best of my knowledge, both SpyMedia and Scoopt are struggling to offload their material. There's certainly a growing trend towards selling "amateur" content to media companies (BlogBurst is another example), but all these systems are highly inefficient - they're applying old media thinking to the new media landscape. How long until Flickr gets into this space?

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