About Sell-It.Media
The moment matters.
The market didn't exist.
London, July 1993
Nick Tapper was filing travel surveys in an office near Buckingham Palace. Dull work, and his mind was somewhere else — until the sirens started.
“The Queen, Buckingham Palace and Police sirens, told me something serious was taking place”
Nick Tapper, Founder Sell-It.Media
He grabbed a camera and went out onto the street. He didn't know what was going on. He shot it anyway.
Then came the question every eyewitness eventually asks: what do I do with this?
How do I get these published?
Nick rang The Sun. The Sun suggested the Evening Standard, who still had an evening edition to fill. He called, explained what he had, and was told to wait for a motorcycle courier.
This was 1993 — the film still had to be processed. So he handed the roll to a stranger on a motorbike and watched it ride away.
That was the second problem. He no longer had the original, and no way to prove what was on it.
Then a call from a picture library wanting to secure the photos. Nick had no idea what they were worth, no idea what to say, and nobody to ask. So he stalled. An hour passed. Nothing.
Heading home on the Underground that evening, he glanced at a stranger's newspaper and saw his own photograph on the front page of the Evening Standard.
Headline news
The break-in at the Palace had been staged by protesters.
The protesters had brought their own photographer. They knew which newsroom to call and when. That evening, the BBC ran their picture, not Nick's.
He was closer. He was faster. He was the one who happened to be there. And he lost — not on the quality of the photograph, but because the other side had a route to market and he didn't.
A cheque from the Evening Standard turned up eventually. It paid for a cheap weekend in Greece.
30 years on the other side of the desk
Nick went on to spend a career in the industry that had just outmanoeuvred him — senior producer at the BBC, Channel 4 and TVNZ.
Which meant he spent decades watching the same transaction from the newsroom side: how much eyewitness footage a bulletin depends on, how casually it gets sourced, and how rarely the person who filmed it is part of the conversation about what it's worth.
The itch never went away. Not about the money — about the structure. Nothing in that 1993 afternoon was anybody's fault. There was simply no mechanism. No way to establish what footage was worth, no way to keep hold of the original, no way for a newsroom to know who it was dealing with.
Thirty years later, most of that was still true.
So we built the thing that was missing
Sell-It.Media is an independent marketplace for verified eyewitness news footage.
Some of the most important footage in the world is shot by people who simply happened to be there. News organisations have relied on it for decades. There has never been a clear, fair, global way to check it, price it and license it properly.
That's what we do.
Every piece of footage on Sell-It.Media is:
- Checked — assessed for newsworthiness and for whether it's genuine
- Shown only to verified media buyers — not published, not posted, not scraped
- Sold at open auction — the highest bidder wins the exclusive
- Licensed for a defined 12-month period — you keep the original file
We're independent. We're not a publisher and we don't own the content — editorial judgement stays with the newsroom that buys it. And we don't set prices. Open competition does.
What we won't take
We don't trade in entertainment clips, influencer content or anything that isn't news. Pets, scenery, staged material, anything already posted publicly.
If it isn't newsworthy, it doesn't belong here. That restraint is the point: it's what makes the footage on the platform worth a newsroom's attention.
If you filmed it
You keep control of your material. You see what the market will genuinely pay rather than accepting the first number offered. You get paid properly for something you were never going to be paid for at all.
The three questions Nick couldn't answer in 1993 — is this worth anything, who do I trust with it, how do I keep hold of it — now have answers.
If you run a newsroom
Fast access to footage from the scene, checked before it reaches you. Rights that are clear, exclusive and settled in the same transaction. Less legal and reputational exposure than sourcing from a public feed, and a great deal less time spent chasing anonymous accounts for permission.