Spot.us

Spot.Us was a non-profit organization designed to bring citizens, journalists, and news publishers together in an online marketplace based on crowdsourcing and crowdfunding methods and principles.

It was founded in 2008 by David Cohn, who [1] received a $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to pursue his idea.

[3] While providing a new option for funding journalism, it raised questions about activism and new sorts of conflict of interest.

News organizations that wished to gain temporary copyright of articles might do so by contributing over 50 percent of the funding.

Conflicts of interest around Spot.us arose due to the fact that readers were funding journalists' work.