Allvoices.com, a new citizen journalism site, is now paying contributors and working to improve quality by taking such steps as eliminating copyright violations. -DB
San Francisco Chronicle
May 26, 2009
By Deborah Gage
Last August, we reported on Allvoices.com, a news site that had started to pay people for contributions. The idea was to create a community where people from all over the world could get together and talk about current events.
Ten months later, how’s that experiment going? Around 40 percent of the site’s contributors have opted to get paid, said founder Amra Tareen, and Web traffic is increasing, especially from outside the U.S. Quantcast ranks Allvoices.com as one of the Web’s top 5,000 sites.
But there have been some problems with quality control. Not all of the content has been good or original, and too much of it violated copyrights.
Allvoices needs more contributors who have the skills to attract readers, she said, so on May 1 the company tweaked its payment program. Contributors are now rewarded not just for generating page views, but for building a social network, on the theory that both readers and advertisers will flock to good content and reliable personal brands.
Contributions, for example, can now be automatically e-mailed and posted to Twitter. Copyright violations are no longer allowed, and content is rated for quality every month.
“We’re always fixing something — the community’s always one step ahead,” Tareen said. “Some of the words are profane and advertisers don’t want ads there, but otherwise it’s a lot of fun and the site continues to grow.”
Tareen is a Muslim/engineer/MBA/ex-venture capitalist who grew up in Pakistan and Australia and started the site partly as a way to tell her own stories. She is now fundraising for a Series B round.
Copyright 2009 Hearst Communications Inc.