News channels pay for video footage. They always have. So why does the person who filmed the moment everyone's talking about usually walk away with nothing?
When something big happens, news producers go hunting. They scour Instagram, Facebook, X - every social feed they can find - looking for footage shot by people who were actually there. They lift the best clips and lead their bulletins with them.
The person who filmed it? They get paid diddly squat.
By the time a clip is doing the rounds online, the exclusivity is gone and so is most of its value. The eyewitness loses control of their footage and never sees a cent. The newsroom gets second-hand material everyone else already has. Nobody really wins.
"Our job is to find the true value of news video."
Nick Tapper, founder, Sell-It.Media
Sell-It.Media was built to flip that on its head. Instead of letting your footage leak across social media for free, you send it to us before it's been shared. We verify it, then make it available to the news media outlets that actually need it.
Then they bid. The winning newsroom gets genuine exclusive footage for their coverage. You get paid. That's the whole idea: turn a lose-lose into a win-win.
If you saw it and thought "people need to see this" - a protest turning, a crash, extreme weather, a rescue, a moment of chaos or courage on an ordinary street - there's a good chance a newsroom wants it. The footage that leads the news is rarely shot by a broadcaster. It's shot by whoever happened to be there, phone already out.
The one rule that matters most: don't post it publicly first. Once it's out, the exclusivity that makes it valuable is gone. Send it to us while it's still yours.
Selling your footage doesn't mean handing it over and hoping for the best. You decide to submit it, we handle the verification and the negotiation, and the rights are licensed cleanly to the buyer who wins the bid. Nothing gets used without that transaction happening first - which is exactly why it's worth money instead of getting scraped off a feed for free.
It also means you're dealing with people who do this properly. News agencies have paid for footage for a very long time. The problem has never been that your video isn't valuable - it's that the old way of finding it cut the person who shot it out of the deal entirely. We put them back in.
Every day, footage worth real money gets posted for free, lifted by a producer, and run on the news while the person who captured it gets nothing. You don't have to be one of them.
Next time you film something the world needs to see, you've got a choice: hand it over for nothing, or send it to the people who'll get you paid.
