Is Newzulu Ltd a next-gen disruptor?

Newzulu Ltd (ASX:NWZ) is looking to be a next-gen disruptor following in the footsteps of SEEK Limited (ASX:SEK).

Tom Richardson

Tom is a holder of the CFA Society of the UK administered Investment Management Certificate (IMC) and has more than a decade's professional experience in the investment management industry in Australia and the UK. Tom now works as a writer and editor for TMF Australia and has two easy to remember rules of investing he likes to follow. Avoid overpaying for growth stocks and avoid paying at all for stocks that are cheap for a reason. Tom prefers growth investing over value investing and says it's not rocket science, just avoid overpaying for the best returns.

Published April 27, 2015 4:55 pm AEST

Disruptive news sourcing and distribution business Newzulu Ltd (ASX: NWZ) this morning announced it has struck a content syndication agreement with Getty Images to distribute crowd sourced news content to Getty's client list of media outlets, creative agencies and commercial businesses worldwide.

The agreement is expected to focus on increased distribution of crowd-sourced videos including videos sourced from the Newzulu Live mobile video streaming platform.

Newzulu is a digitally-driven media company that offers to pay members of the public or freelance journalists a fee for photos or videos taken that cover news stories worldwide. The freelancers effectively take a small cut of the fee that Newzulu receives when selling on the images to major news distributors.

Notably, the news media landscape is changing fast, first disrupted by the shift online and now potentially demolished by the shift toward social media where people share news within their own self-constructed networks.

Indeed, Newzulu may be one of the first ASX-listed businesses to harness the seemingly supernatural powers of social media network Twitter Inc to help monetise its business.

For example anyone with a smart phone anywhere in the world can send in images to Newzulu via the Twitter social network and also check to see what images are required. In effect Newzulu is working toward creating a global army of citizen journalists able to offer the best images of recent news events such as the earthquake in Nepal.

The tech innovator has other distribution agreements with the Press Association in the UK and Ireland, Agence France Pressse (AFP) in France and the Australian Associated Press (AAP) among other news global news distributors.

Of course for investors the question is whether Newzulu can turn its promise into profit, as its investment for growth means it recently posted a substantial half-year loss.

The jury's out on that one, although selling for 11 cents today the stock is arguably a spec buy.

Other internet-based disruptive success stories include SEEK Limited (ASX: SEK) and REA Group Limited (ASX: REA), although there's another online business that probably has the most gangbusters growth potential of all. To find out all about it just read on below.

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