Daryl Lang, PDNPulse, Getty Images’s Scoopt Shuts Down. Here’s Why It Failed.:
Getty Images-owned citizen photojournalism site Scoopt is closing. The small photo agency will stop accepting new images Friday, February 6. At the end of this post is the letter Scoopt sent to members announcing the shutdown.
What went wrong here? Digital cameras and camera phones are wildly popular. Audiences and media companies adore user-generated content. Scoopt had the right technology and a huge distribution network through Getty. Citizen journalism is red hot right now. How come nobody can make a successful business out of it?
The most important part: Getty failed to understand the basic nature of how and why people share information:
To understand why, we need to look at how people behave when they’re lucky enough to get a hot news photo. When a random citizen snaps a photo of something amazing (like the water landing of a passenger jet in the middle of a major city, for example), some kind of storytelling instinct kicks in. They want to tell as many people as possible, as fast as possible. They may also want to make money off their work, but that can come later. And so they seek out the channels that already reach millions of people: Flickr, Twitter, TV news, newspapers, etc. They aren’t going to citizen journalism sites because these sites aren’t as popular. Citizen journalism is still too uneven and too random to attract an audience by itself.
The problem: To work, Scoopt had to be popular enough for the average person to know about it. And you can’t get that popular if all you do is citizen journalism.
If you want to aggregate content from a large number of people, you have to understand how and why people contribute information to aggregators. If you want a product to “go viral”, you have to understand how viral expansion loops work and build virality into the product.
If you want to build a new business, it has to have a business model built in. If you want to capture value as a hub, you better create a lot of edges.
Why didn’t Getty figure it out?
John Harrington nails it with Getty Flushes Scoopt:
Getty is a great integrator, but not an innovator. Getty has never invented anything.
Agreed:
