Hashtag analysis and protest pics from the crowd define #Protestify

image
Photo credit: Joshua Sinn.

If the symbol of protest for a previous generation was a Black Power fist, maybe the symbol of this generation includes a smartphone and a hashtag. That’s certainly what Protestify thinks at least.

Based out of the Columbia University Startup Lab in New York City, the crowdsourcing setvice to allow people in a protest to sell their photos to news media completed a $32,000 crowdfunding campaign Thursday, hitting their goal on Kickstarter with just hours to spare.

See their awesome animated pitch video below to get a better taste of the idea.

Don’t go to Google Play or the App Store to find their services. Protesify is not an app.

Instead, anyone who uses the #protestify hashtag with a social media app is sent a copyright agreement then contacted again if their content is sold.

It seems like a good time to sell the value of shots from the crowd.

In the last couple weeks high-profile protests have attracted thousands of people, the attention of world news and a common hashtag including #ICantBreathe and #BlackLivesMatter in the United States, #YaMeCanse in Mexico, #UmbrellaRevolution in Hong Kong and others in Spain and Hungary.

Protestify succeeds where the Helsinki-based Vews did not. An app that had a near identical function, Vews canceled its $100,000 crowdfunding campaign after one month, attracting only about $1,000 from backers.

Attempts to reach Vews for comment via email and various instant message services were unsuccessful.

Unlike Vews, Protestify analyzes and makes visualizations of social media activity to create data visualizations for news outlets and continue an ongoing effort to “map the entire social media space for protest news.”

The incentive of hashtag analysis as an award attracted more funders above $200 than any other reward, including some unique art and original prints by former NY Times photojournalist Michael Kamber.

The offer to analyze startup pitches for $100 a pop brought in 12 backers.

Editor’s Note: This story was written when Through the Cracks Editor Khari Johnson worked for the crowdsourcing photography app Scoopshot, a company that could be considered a competitor of Protestify.

Related Posts

1 in 4 features at SXSW Film Festival were crowdfu... Crowds in the street near 6th Street and Red River at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Credit: Davidlohr Bueso Roughly one in four films shown at SXSW Film Fe...
Satirical news show gets real after failed Scottis... The hosts of satirical news show “Dateline: Scotland” have launched a Indiegogo campaign to create a real broadcast news show to cover news from a...
News startups flourish after failed independence v... A Scottish pro independence rally. Credit: Alister. In the weeks after the people of Scotland voted in a closely contested election to remain a pa...
The revolution will be televised   Credit: Pasu Au Yeung. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”. So said Frederick Douglass, the Afric...

Comments

comments

Khari Johnson
Khari is founder and editor of Through the Cracks: Crowdfunding in Journalism. He also writes about bots and artificial intelligence for VentureBeat. He has built news startups in the U.S. and Europe for the last decade.

NO COMMENTS

Leave a Reply
http://throughcracks.com/protestify-hashtag-analysis-crowdfunding-journalism/
throughcracks.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-51
125247
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:SKNSMTMIJ3O4JSKXLVSMMFSM2K52BGAI
<urn:uuid:a6b9d97c-1ba8-4740-b8a6-2d23ffeab5e6>
2018-12-15T06:42:06Z
50.62.125.1
text/html
sha1:NWSVOF7HM5BOFZH23W7FF6HTBX6UKBRC
<urn:uuid:ba02ad70-b077-4c05-b7cf-f908f2949bdc>
http://throughcracks.com/protestify-hashtag-analysis-crowdfunding-journalism/
response
<urn:uuid:c1bdc67d-8752-4ab8-933e-0f3f8974bed9>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-51
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for December 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-182-98-18.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/