15.08.12
Photographer makes $20,000 with Scoopshot
Arto Mäkelä has earned more than $19,000 by taking pictures and uploading them to the free-to-download Scoopshot app on his Android smartphone, and with a little help from his DSLR.
Scoopshot is a crowdsourcing service that allows smartphone owners to sell their photos and videos to the media and other companies via a smartphone app. Users can simply upload interesting images and videos that they think the media may want to publish, or respond to tasks asking Scoopshot’s users to send in specific images in return for a reward, such as a picture of the White House in Washington DC or Big Ben in London.
Arto made his money by responding to a task set by Fonecta, a Finnish directory services company, which asked Scoopshot’s users to send in pictures of businesses across the country. Arto went from city-to-city capturing thousands of pictures of businesses and selling them to Fonecta.
Arto told Professional Photographer, “I have sent over 10,000 of these pictures, most where bought but some not, and they paid me around $2 per picture.”
It wasn’t just the camera phone Arto used though, he also used his DSLR, “Most of them were taken with a mobile phone camera but some of them were shot with a DSLR-camera, for example, in shopping malls where the lighting can be a bit dimmer than outdoors. Sending photos for tasks was much easier capturing them with mobile phone app so that’s why I used it most of the time. Scoopshot is designed for mobile phones after all. You can import pictures from your camera but you have to do it one by one.”
Fonecta told Professional Photographer that they collect photos for companies, “Photos have been gathered via Scoopshot. Scoopshoters see the closest target companies and their location in their mobile applications. Scoopshoters only need to take either an outdoor or indoor photo of the company. No additional information is needed. This is a so-called microtask functionality, which is customized especially for Fonecta’s use.
“We don’t select any specific photographer. Our Scoopshot task is available for all users. Approved photos are paid €1,5, we set the price, and they are published in Fonecta’s online services (Eniro.fi, Osuma.fi, Fonecta.fi). So far more than 70,000 scoopshoters’ company photos have been purchased and photos have been added to Online services” they said.
See examples at osuma.fi
So a few trips and several thousand pictures later, Arto had earned enough money from Scoopshot’s app to book a three-week long vacation to Miami and the Caribbean, as well as an array of high-tech gadgets, including a widescreen TV and a top-of-the-range digital SLR camera.
“I downloaded the Scoopshot app thinking I might be able to make a bit of spare cash, but before I knew it I was making something like $500 a week,” said Arto Mäkelä.
Arto told Professional Photographer, “I was doing it for about a year and I only did it some days a week.”
Niko Ruokosuo, CEO, Scoopshot, said: “We’re thrilled that Arto has enjoyed such success using our app. Since launching in 2010, we’ve paid out more than $300,000 to our users and we’re paying more out every day. With more than 110,000 users globally, our service is now available in 160 countries worldwide and we’re expanding rapidly into new markets.”
Scoopshot operates a commission-based business model. For each image that is sold, Scoopshot takes a 30 per cent share – considerably lower than some other services which take 50 per cent or more. Unlike other services, which restrict users to a set price for all content, Scoopshot gives its users freedom to choose how much they wish to sell an image for, based on how unique or newsworthy it is.
Rewards offered for performing tasks are set by the companies that commission them, and Scoopshot’s users can choose whether they want to contribute based on the fee that is on offer.
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