Scoopshot set to revolutionise UK media and advertising industry by providing verified user-generated images

Helsinki, Finland, April 28, 2014 – Scoopshot (www.scoopshot.com), the global leader in crowdsourced mobile photo and video content, today announced a new drive into the UK market – allowing advertisers and media outlets to source user generated images without fears of breaking copyright issues and incurring costly lawsuits. Evening Standard, the first major UK publisher to use Scoopshot, launched the service April 3.

The company’s innovative authentication process examines every video and image for its geographical location, exchangable image file format (EXIF) data and resolution before embedding its ID number and photographer name into the image. When taken with the Scoopshot app, the image is tranferred directly to the Scoopshot servers without any possibility of image manipulation. This offers editors the same confidence in guaranteeing the authenticity of crowdsourced photographs as those taken by in-house photo desks, offering significant savings on costly stock images while taking the risk out of user-generated content.

Scoopshot CEO Petri Rahja said: “During the UK floods earlier this year every major media outlet featured user-generated images, but how many editing hours were wasted verifying each individual image? There is clearly an appetite for verified content taken in real time, but many end users in the UK have no way of monetising these images and media have limited resources to verify them.”

End-users download the Scoopshot app and can then offer any image taken on their smartphone for sale to media outlets and advertisers. Should a publication or marketing agency require a specific image, it can commission the Scoopshot community to fulfil the brief and purchase any images which meet its criteria. This has huge implications during breaking news events in today’s era of 24/7 news coverage.

Over 500,000 users across 177 countries currently use the app and over 70 major media outlets use the service to source images and videos of breaking news stories and images for advertising. One mobile photographer alone has earned over £17,000 by selling images to major media outlets. Individual photos can be sold for up to £5,000.

Scoopshot predicts millions of users worldwide will utilise its service by the end of this year, helped by the company’s drive into new Global and European markets, including the UK. Top international publishers including News Corp Australia are already signed up to use the service. International brands including Fiat and Oxfam have also used images purchased through Scoopshot in high-profile international campaigns.

Large Scale Results

More than 1.3 million Scoopshot photos and videos have been posted, more than 1,000 tasks have been completed and almost £300,000 has been paid to Scoopshooters worldwide. Dozens of media brands have run successful user-generated Scoopshot Task campaigns:

• WAZ, Germany received 27,023 photos for “Show us your Favourite Coffee Cup”
• Boerderij, Netherlands received 13,200 photos for “Share your Family Farming”
• Apple Daily, Hong Kong received 2,922 photos for “Show us Your Valentine’s Gifts”
• The London Evening Standard received images from readers across London for “London Photographs”

Scoopshot lets communities contribute content while publishers maintain hard-won, high standards of journalistic integrity.

Neil Hunter, Digital Operations Editor, Evening Standard, said: “We were looking for a tool to create a greater level of engagement with our readers and create new content for our web and app. Scoopshot gave us the opportunity to do both. The initial results are really promising, readers have been sending in photos and the standard is generally very good. We aim to cover events and community news from all of London’s boroughs and this is a very good way of us doing it, while also creating a new way of engaging readers.”

With the app available on iOS, Android and Windows devices, millions can easily join the Scoopshooter community now.