Now you have your username and password you can log in to SWNS.rocks and track where your pictures, video or text gets used. This page explains what you see in your account and what we are doing in the background to make it work.

  • Asset – a single piece of news, it could be a photo, video or text.
  • Story – a wrapper which can hold a number of different assets.
  • Usage – when an asset is printed by a paying publisher.

My assets

This is where you can see all of your assets and all your sales. The sale price is what you get paid. You’ll notice the sale status in brackets, (uninvoiced) is the first status. This means that SWNS has not yet been paid by the publisher. Don’t worry, we don’t believe that our contributors should wait to be paid at the end of the lengthy billing cycle imposed by some of the major news publishers. We pay you as soon as we’ve confirmed that your asset is published. You’ll also see each time one of your assets has been downloaded by one of our revenue share partners. The best way to maximise your sales is to reach the biggest market so SWNS has joined forces with companies around the world. If this download results in a direct sale it will be listed under sales although not every one does.

The menu in SWNS.rocks is found top left

My sales – This is where you you can see each time one of your assets is used by a publication which pays an individual asset fee. For regular contributors who want to keep an ongoing track of their usage you can download the data as a .csv file using the top left link.

All submissions – Here you can see what other people are sharing with SWNS.

My submissions

On this view you just see your submissions. You create a new story using the red dot in the bottom right corner. Use the headline and strapline to describe the story as best you can. When you have created the story you can add as many assets as you like from the red dot menu. Your submissions can be see by other users so don’t include any personal data that you want to keep private. You don’t have to use this process to sell your news content with SWNS and that is fine. You can email us on pix@swns.com, news@swns.com or video@swns.com and we will will craft your submission into a story and add it to your account. If you share like this your assets won’t appear as a submission but they you will still be able to track usage and sales. If your files are too big to share by email you can upload to us at swns.wetransfer.com.

Every day of the year the SWNS distributes over 100 unique stories and 1000 individual assets to news publishers around the globe

Tracking all of the usage and payments is a complicated task which we manage in different ways. As soon as we send out an asset we have software developed with funding from the Google Digital News Initiative which searches the internet to find if that asset got used. This happens in real time so you might see usage and sales in your account within minutes. We also have a team doing manual checks of the publishers we supply. We expect to get manual usage added to your account within two weeks of publication. A different group within SWNS makes the payments to contributors. At the moment they process new payments to contributors on Tuesdays and Fridays. This means that (as long as you have given us your payment details) you might be paid for your sales in more that one payment.

Working with SWNS also gives you access to payments from our growing network of smaller publishers. Historically only the bigger news companies were prepared to invest in news. We are changing this, but to achieve the outcome of finding new markets whilst rewarding creators we have to be realistic about pricing. Therefore to some niche and non-core news publishers we offer a limited subscription where assets are not individually priced. Premium and exclusive content is always excluded from these subscriptions. If one of your assets is used in this way you will not receive a individual usage report or payment. Instead, at the end of the financial year we make a calculation across all our contributed content and pay each contributor based on the number of assets you have provided.

In order that we can run an efficient payment system for all our contributors, and to allow for a full billing cycle to complete we will be unable to respond to payment queries until 28 days after publication. If you do think we have made a mistake or missed some usage please wait for 28 days then email pix@swns.com or news@swns.com and we will provide a form where you can get a quick resolution to your issue.

Don’t forget – news moves fast – don’t hang around.