Shootitlive is one of those startups that has been quietly doing its thing and getting very impressive traction. In case of Shootitlive, perhaps not so quietly, as they have over 75 newspapers from Europe as their customers and their solution displays images to over 300 million monthly unique visitors.
Since we last wrote about the company in the distant 2011, they were just getting started in the market but already had impressive clients such as The Times, who used the solution to cover the Royal Wedding.
In simplest terms, with Shootitlive, photographers can upload pictures directly to the news sites without the need to export them from the camera. Everything is done in-camera using a special wifi transmitter.
This saves a lot of time and human resources, as without using this approach one would need to first export the images to a computer, upload them to say an FTP server. Then an editor at the office would have to choose the best ones, send it to the web guy who would finally embed them online. According to co-founder Martin Levy, “for every photo it used to take 10-15 minutes. With Shootitlvie it is instant.”
2011 was an important year for the company as they received funding from Första Enterprenörsfonden that was used to expand the team from two to five people and build the current version of the software. Additionally Andreas Ehn, former CTO of Spotify and current CTO and co-founder of Wrapp joined the board of directors.
Since then, the turnover was growing 70% year on year and is expected to reach €450 000 in 2013.
However, they still have not activated the “secret weapon”. Basically all photographs uploaded through Shootitlive are hosted by them, reaching a staggering 300 million monthly unique viewers. This number has been growing, in the now expected, hockey stick curve with 100 million in 2012 and just 15 million in 2011. Imagine if they would start doing display ads or something else with all of this traffic?
UPDATE: Just to be clear, the 300 million number is on photo and video views each month. The actual unique number of viewers in general is 20 million.
According to Levy, they “…tried with some customers but have not pushed that button yet. Because [they] don’t want to do this incorrectly.” The segmentation is also rather impressive. If you are an advertiser, you would be able to reach people watching a particular local football game in Norway or somebody reading just teenager news in Finland. So when and if Shootitlive finally flips the switch, it will be interesting to see where it takes them.
Top Image Courtesy of Shutterstock // Many Photographers
