Just in: photos of Prince Frederik with unknown girl in park. Video: Actor Viggo Mortensen drunk at Copenhagen bar. Prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen shopping clothes with wife Anne Mette.
A new Danish website offering you the best papparazi-shots and videos – taken by ordinary Danes equipped with mobile camaraphones – have made its way to the top-10 most popular danish websites, generating millions of danish kroners from advertising.
Want to see the site – and the pictures? Sorry – I just made it up. It simply doesn’t exist.. Yet. But take my word: in a year or two from now it will!
The concept is simply so economically compelling, so technologically possible and so appealing for people craving for 15-minutes of fame, entrepreneurs of gossip won’t be able to refuse bringing it alive. Read on:
The site will be constantly updated by the users via sms – or through the website itself. When uploaded and published on the website, other readers supply their own comments to the pictures and rates them, thereby electing the top-“stories” of the day – and bringing fame to the top-“photographers”.
In order to ensure quality and the mix of different photos on the frontpage, and to maintain a basic gossip newsflow, the site will employ an editorial staff of two people. Apart from that costs are kept to a minimum, build on open source software and outsourced, thirdparty, adsales.
Actually the highest cost will be the 5000 danish kroners prize for best photo of the month, and the biannual “photographers parties”, thrown for the active community of smalltime paparazzis by the site. Which in turn assures a loyal and happy paparazzi-community.
I bet you: this is bound to come!
It is a good idea, but won’t there be legal remedies? The premise of the site is, that it is legal to solicitate to make private persons expose the private life of others.
Best regards
Mads
Hi Mads,
As long as the pictures are taken in public area, and are used as “news” on the site, I do believe this should be all right.
If pictures are taken in private settings the case will be different, however. You’d therefor need to be very strict in the communication with the users, telling them what pictures are allright and what pictures are not. And you’d probably also want to make the users take responsibility for not violating any rights when submitting pictures to the site.
Best
Jon
Not quite there yet, but gawker Stalker shows the way…