Today's News Platforms: A Closer Look at Allvoices.com

MediaShift Mark Glaser was in talks with Amra Tareen Ceo, Allvoices. The interview was recorded September 2009. I liked it because it helped me to look behind the scenes of an interesting startup.

You haven't heard of Allvoices yet? - Allvoices is a platform for citizen journalists. They offer an incentive program, so that editors will be paid based on the attractiviness of their content measured in terms of pageviews. They foster conversation with their users via email and take care of suggestions, errors, ideas, wishes and feature requests which will be handed over to a community manager.

Of course like all news platforms they're in search of exclusive content which is easier to market and which can also be delivered to major news platform. News are always geotagged, which helps to aggregate content due to the local context they cover. An algorithm checks for copyright infringements. But Alloices does not rely on machines alone the community itself provides with mechanism to assist in the quality approval process as well.

Their overal business model? Advertising is obvious and syndication is also one revenue path. Rankings drive traffic and comments grow the number of pageviews as much as audience awareness. At the time of the interview Allvoices admitted to be not cash positive. Wonder how it looks today.