Blottr is a citizen journalism news website based in the United Kingdom and started in August 2010 by entrepreneur Adam Baker. Originally featuring hyperlocal news in London, the site has since grown to cover a total of eight UK cities: Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, Leicester and Manchester. In October 2011 Blottr expanded outside of the UK to Blottr France and Blottr Germany. Blottr currently has more than 5000 contributors and more than 1.4 million unique visitors a month.
Contents
Platform
Users who sign up for Blottr can add text, tags, videos and photos to one another's news stories in a wiki-platform. Blottr also features regular columnists whose blog posts are not able to be edited. Blottr circulates news through its website, Twitter, Facebook and a weekly digest email. In order to rate user-generated content, the site uses an "authentication algorithm" which rates users based on influence, number of revisions to a story, number of contributors, and more.
In July 2011, Blottr also launched an iPhone app, Papparappzi, which allows would-be citizen journalists to capture photos and footage of news happening around them and then easily upload it to the Blottr website.
Business model
Blottr has monetized by selling licensing to its crowdsourced news platform, called NewsPoint, starting in June 2011. The site secured an angel investment in May 2011 worth up to ₤1 million to expand its operations. The investor was Mark Pearson, founder of MyVoucherCodes.co.uk.
Contributors participate in a revenue-sharing scheme in which they receive ₤1 for every thousand page views.
Notable Stories
In May 2011, Blottr beat BBC and SkyNews by three hours in a story about a London bomb threat. During the London riots of August 2011, founder Adam Baker says the site broke the news of riots in Ealing and Woolwich before mainstream news outlets.
Awards and Recognition
Startups.co.uk recently awarded Blottr its "Innovative Business of the Year" and "Most Disruptive Business" awards for 2011 at the Tech City UK Entrepreneurship festival. Startups.co.uk said in a statement that "Blottr has real potential to become a very strong digital brand name in the next few years, and is a fabulous example of British creativity and digital prowess". The 2011 Europas also gave Blottr highly commended status for media, recruitment and education.