We’ve written about Allvoices, a citizen journalism platform that is seeing fast growth internationally. In fact, the site, which was launched in 2008, is even approaching CNN’s iReport in terms of worldwide traffic.
According to comScore’s May data, Allvoices saw 3 million unique visitors worldwide compared to 3.6 million unique visitors for CNN’s iReport. But in the U.S., CNN still has a huge market share of traffic. For the same time period, comScore reports 3.3 million unique visitors for iReport, with Allvoices only seeing 730,000 visitors in the U.S. in May. According to Quantcast, Allvoices saw 6.5 million unique monthly visitors in May. The site has also grown its registered number of citizen journalists to 375,000 users from 275,000 in January. CNN has just under 500,000 registered “iReporters.”
Allvoices allows anyone to contribute blog posts, images, videos and other observations, on local and global news. The site’s proprietary technology (AllVoices has filed for three patents) will tag, rank and sort news based on a global, regional, country and city pages and will determine what is breaking news and popular (in terms of phases of a news cycle). The system will also filter for spam, police the site, fact check each user report for credibility and assign a credibility rating to each news report. The site also lets users file reports from their cell phone via MMS and SMS, which is helpful to users in countries where computer usage is low but mobile device usage is high.
While CNN appears to have a foothold in the U.S. for citizen reporters and traffic for iReport, Allvoices seems to be thriving internationally. It is impressive that a bootstrapped startup is successfully competing with large media corporations like CNN. Over the past few months, Allvoices has been ramping up its the presence of its platform internationally, launching global news desks in 30 different cities around the world, where both professional and citizen journalists will provide regular in-country reports from the ground. This is clearly one of the reasons for the site’s continued growth over the past few months.
The company has also recruited talent to help further growth. Allvoices recently brought on Ask.com’s co-founder David Warthen as the startup’s Chief Technology Officer. Interestingly, Allvoices also includes a syndication program that allows media companies and image buyers to license images and content from the platform. The site also offers incentive programs health reporter, including health care for citizen reporters.
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