Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, is a model of labor that has been fully embraced on the Internet over the past couple of years. Crowdsourcing takes tasks traditionally done by a single person or small groups of people, and farms them out to a global workforce. The large-scale committee approach is powerful because it leans on the concept of the "wisdom of crowds" (to a certain extent) which says basically that the more input, the better the output. We've written about a number of companies that employ crowdsourcing to produce their product or service here on ReadWriteWeb, but in this post we'll specifically look at companies that allow you to leverage the crowd to get something done.
The official definition of crowdsourcing from Jeff Howe, is "the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call." Last year we laid out a set of rules for successful crowdsourcing, which might be helpful to keep in mind when employing the services of any of the companies listed below.
One of the most well-developed areas of crowdsourcing services on the Internet is graphic design. Generally, these sites exist in the form of graphic design contest web sites where clients put up a call for submissions for a piece of graphic design work, and designers compete for a cash prize by submitting designs.
crowdSPRING is the latest entry into the increasingly crowded crowdsourced graphic design service market. The service officially launches today, after a $5000 design competition it held over the winter to design the crowdSPRING site itself -- a wise move because it shows that the founders are willing to "eat their own dogfood" and also attracted an initial set of designers to the site.
crowdSPRING is well set up, offering legal protections for both buyers and sellers and a guarantee that all projects posted on the site will get at least 25 entries. crowdSPRING charges a 15% commission on all posted projects.
99designs is very likely the largest graphic design contest site on the web. From its humble beginnings as an area on the web development discussion forums at SitePoint, to being spun off from the SitePoint Marketplace a few months ago, 99designs has experienced astonishing growth to become a leader in its market. The site now has 18,000 registered users -- 11,000 are designers -- with 150 being added each day. $10,000 worth of prize money is put up for grabs on the site daily and it serves 5 million page views per month.
SitePoint co-founder Mark Harbottle tells me that many designers use the site for lead generation, and that often, winning designers find that contest holders will turn into long term clients who forgo the crowdsourcing option on future projects to work directly with a designer whose work they know they like.
GFXContests is a forum-based design contest site founded two years ago that seems to attract mostly logo design jobs. Full disclosure: I was one of the co-founders of GFXContests, and sold the site earlier this year. I am no longer involved with it. An interesting note: the site's logo was designed via a design contest held on the SitePoint Contests service (now 99designs).
DesignOutpost is one of the oldest design contest services, sometimes credited with originating the idea -- though that's up for debate. The site is forum-based and relies on a "design team" (pre-approved designers) to fill out its crowd.
Designcontest.net is another large, forum-based design contest site that also relies on the pre-approved "design team" concept.
Pixish (our coverage) is a design and photography contest marketplace launched in February by well-known designer Derek Powazek. Unlike many of the design contest services in this round up, prizes on Pixish aren't always cash.
Others
A number of large web development discussion communities host contest areas, including NamePros, v7 Network, and Webmaster Talk. Meanwhile, Grapic Competitions is a directory of individual graphic design competitions (not affiliated with the above sites), many that offer cash prizes.
Top Coder uses a competition approach to leverage is distributed network of over 50,000 developers to create software for its enterprise clients.
The software development community -- especially the open source community -- has long used "bounties" to help lure developers to certain tasks. microPledge (our coverage) is an escrow service that allows people to do three things: set up, contribute to and pay out software bounties, accept donations for projects, or set up a fund/bounty for an in house project (as a developer). In essence, that means people can give the crowd an incentive to work on a software development project.
Like microPledge, Cofundos.org (our coverage) is a web service for offering and managing software bounties. Cofundos.org is focused specifically on open source software, but the team behind it has indicated that they plan to adapt the concept to other areas, including beyond software development. Expanding beyond software development (to say, event funding) is something that microPledge has also hinted at pursuing.
Fixya is a question and answer community, in which people ask and answer technical support queries. Think of it as Yahoo! Answers for tech support. Uniquely, though, Fixya has partnered with some companies to provide an official channel for crowdsourced tech support. Most recently, the site launched a co-branded version of their service for Best Buy.
The goal of Get Satisfaction (recent coverage) isn't really to crowdsource customer service, so much as to make it easier for people to get access to companies they have an issue with. However, people do provide one another with help on the site -- similar to at Fixya -- and companies can use it to monitor customer support issues to more quickly tell if an issue isn't just an isolated incident.
IdeaScale (our coverage) does for research and development what Get Satisfaction does for customer service by providing Digg-style feature request boards. Companies are able to tap the "wisdom of the crowds" to learn what their customers want from their product or service.
featurelist.org is very similar to IdeaScale, but more public, not branded, and focused on software.
FeVote is another suggestion board web application that lets companies crowdsource their research and development. Like Get Satisfaction, FeVote aims to put the control in the hands of the users by encouraging them to make suggestion boards for their favorite companies.
CollabAndRate is "organic collaboration" software that enables companies to poll their customers, employees, or partners for new ideas. Essentially, this is the same idea as the three sites mentioned above, but with a slightly different pitch.
Amazon's Mecahnical Turk service (recent coverage) is what the company refers to as an "on-demand workforce." In reality, Mechanical Turk is a 100,000 strong member crowd that people can call on to complete a wide variety of tasks. See the 10,000 Cents art project as example of how one can leverage Amazon's crowdsourcing service.
Think of BigCarrot (our coverage) as microPledge or Cofundos.org for just about anything. BigCarrot specializes in "inducement prizes," which are basically cash bounties for achieving a specific goal. In fact, inducement prize contests and software bounties operate on essentially the same premise -- dangle a carrot and let talented people fight for it. Large-scale inducement prizes aren't easy to organize, though, so BigCarrot hopes to make it easier by crowdsourcing the prize creation process and letting anyone create or contribute to a prize
Comments
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Crowdsourcing may be the only option for cash strapped Entrepreneurs with no money to hire good, loyal people.
Overall, the quality of the service is inferior and you can be quite frustrated by the misunderstandings when you are trying to communicate to strangers.
Most of those who participate have not reached the professional level in their expertise - so be prepared for mistakes and be prepared to be patient.
Some businesses are now starting to do this on Craigslist.
Creating an ad in the classifieds for submissions for a design or SEO project where on the chosen winner gets paid -
Would experts really put up with that - so what you are left with is students with time on their hands or others in remote countries desperate for work
Posted by: SearcHâ—† EngineS WEB | May 12, 2008 6:12 AM
This is a great post. It is a very nice blog too. I add it to my favorites. Thank you
Posted by: John Elar | May 12, 2008 6:13 AM
Only works with Vista!
Posted by: steveballmer | May 12, 2008 6:21 AM
I must say RWW is getting more and more interesting post. Have been reading it for last 2 years but started casualy and now more frequently.
To this post = it would be good to see price comparison for design services fees. anyone saw that somewhere?
Posted by: Janusz | May 12, 2008 6:27 AM
It's a little different perspective, but the bug.gd search engine is also taking advantage of crowd-sourcing, but in-reverse.
You search for error messages on http://bug.gd, and you find all the people who submitted solutions in the past. Later, the site asks you to come back and provide a solution for the next guy.
If everyone does this, over time, all the common error messages will have some good workarounds.
Be part of the solution.
Posted by: Matthew | May 12, 2008 8:38 AM
What about utest.com? it's a Crowdsourced for software testing.
Posted by: Dan Tyre | May 12, 2008 9:54 AM
This is a great way to start gaining a real portfolio out of college! With how flooded the market is with graphic designers it can be tough to get a foot in the door. I was in Kansas City a couple of years ago looking for a job and everyone wanted 2-5 years experience. The jobs that didn't were taken by local,current college students. By winning a couple contests you can start to gain the name and experience to get in at these levels. And they pay!
Posted by: Eric Brown | May 12, 2008 11:40 AM
Hey Josh,
You forgot User Voice (http://www.uservoice.com) which was launched not to long ago. Its for outsourcing R&D. I saw that 99 Designs is using it, so it must be gaining some traction.
Posted by: Jason | May 12, 2008 12:50 PM
Oh and CollabAndRate seems to be dead. I haven't heard back from them in over 6 months.
Posted by: Jason | May 12, 2008 12:51 PM
Another good resource is http://www.numberzoom.com/ which is a crowdsourced reverse phone number lookup or whitepages.
Posted by: trish mcelroy | May 12, 2008 2:34 PM
Funny - Crowdspring crowdsourced their logo at their competitor, 99Designs.com:
http://99designs.com/contests/321
Posted by: Mike W. | May 12, 2008 5:23 PM
That is funny Mike. From what I've seen 99designs is the place to go for pure volume of design contests and quality of designers.
Posted by: Dave Miles | May 12, 2008 5:43 PM
hey josh, saw SuggestionBox [www.suggestionbox.com] on TC recently, sounds like they're in the same space.
Posted by: Jason | May 12, 2008 10:51 PM
I've seen similar companies a few years ago but didn't know that is Crowdsourcing :-)
Now it is the second time I heard Crowdsourcing this month. Very interesting post and will check some of these websites in the future.
Thanks for sharing it.
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Posted by: HappyTutors.com - Connect Tutors with Students & Parents | May 13, 2008 12:00 AM
"Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, is a model of labor that has been fully embraced on the Internet over the past couple of years"
No offense meant, but this statement is not true at all.
For starters, just google 99Designs and Pixish and you'll see it isn't so.
'Crowdsourcing' the term is real. Fully embracing it? Not at all.
Posted by: cat | May 13, 2008 3:11 AM
Another example... ContentWorkspace.com helps with manually intensive tasks incurred while imaging documents:
Document and Form Classification, Indexing Documents, Data Entry, Language Translation, Finding Duplicates.
Posted by: ContentWorkspace.com | May 13, 2008 6:00 AM
For developers competing for business - take a look at the online demo of the Bitrix Virtual Lab:
http://www.bitrixsoft.com/sitemanager/demo.php . Bitrix with their 7.0 release has set a high benchmark in CMS that should be part of your tool kit.
Posted by: Ralph | May 13, 2008 6:46 AM
We tried to figure out how to use some of these applications to generate unique content when building a travel portal and failed miserably.
That being said, we found what might be the best crowd sourcing tool out there - Craig's List. A quick "gig" post got us lots of freelancers willing to work for a piece rate and we could control for quality and payment.
It worked perfectly.
Posted by: Chris | May 13, 2008 9:19 AM
@cat #15: The term "crowdsourcing" was originated by Jeff Howe in that article... the concept itself has been in practice for many years.
Posted by: Josh Catone
|
May 13, 2008 9:32 AM
does anybody know if there is a 'crowdsourcing' site for salespeople? For example, a b2b company has a great product and you have sales/production already started. If you had many many salespeople looking at your product, there's a good chance a handful of them could throw a big deal together based on who they are dealing with already.
Know anything like it?
Cheers, great post on crowd sourcing.
Posted by: ryan | May 13, 2008 9:15 PM
Josh, If you read my comment you'll see that I am not disagreeing that the term is a known.
I am pointing out the it has NOT been 'fully embraced'.
Posted by: cat | June 7, 2008 4:53 PM
Very interesting article. It's nice to see the wide range of firms and business models trying to harness the power of crowdsourcing.
We are launching VendorCity in public BETA next week. Our crowdsourcing tool provides companies with access to highly recommended vendors in their area. This not only allows companies to find trusted vendors, it also allows them to reward the vendors that have done an excellent job.
At VendorCity, we have two core business beliefs that drive us forward every day:
Vendors and service providers are critical partners in running any successful businessSo begins our experience with crowdsourcing the vendor selection and review process.
-jc
Posted by: JC Cameron | June 10, 2008 11:19 AM