From TechCrunch France comes the news that Citizen Bay has just launched. Citizen Bay is “a web-community of users searching, viewing, sharing and producing local information”. The first local information available is local news, classifieds and events. All information is submitted by users and other visitors vote on the relevancy of said information.
What’s interesting is that aspiring newswriters cab earn up to $10.00 an article (up to a maximum of $100 a day) for submitted articles and $1 for seeded article (an article that appears elsewhere submitted to the site a la Digg.com. “Every day the top 10 most popular news stories attached to each primary city are rewarded with money. “Most popular” is determined only by the votes of Citizenbay users. To be rewarded, a news story must have been voted by at least 15 different users.” No such payments exist for submitted classifieds or events.
What it means: Citizen Bay is trying to differentiate itself from sites like Digg.com by i) being local ii) having additional local content and iii) rewarding contributors who submit the top news of the day. I think Local is a great positioning for user-submitted news (and obviously classifieds and events). The key success factors will be user adoption and critical mass of content. Not sure if I like the user interface (too crowded) and the business model is not clear (not even using Google AdSense).
Definitely newspapers, directories, local search sites, a local government sites could certainly use similar content and these companies should be exploring ways to start collecting that kind of data as well.
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