Blottr

» see blottr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Blottr started in August 2010 as hyperlocal London news written by whoever happened to be standing there. Adam Baker built it on a premise that was close to consensus at the time: the people at an event outnumber the reporters sent to cover it by several thousand to one, so the bottleneck in news is not gathering, it is publishing. Give the crowd a publishing button and the coverage problem solves itself.

It grew fast enough to look like proof. Over five thousand contributors, 1.4 million unique visitors a month, then expansion out of London to eight UK cities including Manchester and Edinburgh, and in October 2011 across the Channel into Blottr France and Blottr Germany. Startups.co.uk put it twentieth in its 2012 hundred.

Blottr was a UK product and I was nowhere in its coverage area, but the argument it was built on arrived in Turkey too, and it arrived without a website. In June 2013 the fastest news in Istanbul was on Twitter while one television channel ran a documentary about penguins, and the penguin entered the language as shorthand for the gap. That is the same thesis Blottr was funding at a pound per thousand impressions. Twitter did it for nothing and never needed anybody to file.

~ the record ~

~ the week of the riots ~

The riots are the case Blottr made for itself, and it is a fair one. Baker said the site carried disturbances in Ealing and Woolwich before the mainstream outlets had them, which is what you would expect from a network of contributors who live in Ealing and Woolwich against a newsroom dispatching a van from central London.

What the week also demonstrated was the harder half of the idea. A crowd reports fast and verifies badly, and August 2011 in Britain was a masterclass in that: rumors of fires and attacks that never happened moved faster than any of it. A platform that pays per thousand impressions has an incentive problem built into the payment rail, because the fastest claim and the checked claim arrive at very different times and earn very differently.

Blottr did have moderation and did have editorial staff. The point is that the cost of the verification layer scales with the volume of contributions, while the revenue from a page view does not.

~ what the model could not pay for ~

A pound per thousand impressions is fifty pence for a story that does respectably on a local news site. Blottr took angel money in May 2011, up to a million pounds from Mark Pearson of MyVoucherCodes, and built NewsPoint so that publishers could license the crowdsourcing engine instead of buying the stories, which was the sensible pivot toward revenue that did not depend on its own traffic. It was not enough. The site shut in April 2014 with no closing statement that anyone recorded, and blottr.com today answers with a hundred-byte script that drops you on a parking lander.

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