The two faces of crowdsourcing
I first learned about crowdsourcing in about 2004. This was four years after starting Threadless which has become kind of the poster child of crowdsourcing. As I learn more and more about what the word means and now see it getting a bad name from some people as spec work or cheap labor and such I’ve been thinking a lot about what is right and wrong about it.
I’ve found that there are two very different sides to the concept. On one side, you have outsourced labor to the crowd. Let’s call it labor crowdsourcing. On the other, you have productive things being done with people’s passions. Let’s call this passion crowdsourcing.
On the labor side you have businesses like crowdSPRING (logo labor), Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (general tasks) and Victors & Spoils (ad agency work). These are just a few examples. There are plenty more and they are not all bad! However, I’ve found that most of the companies that are creating a bad name for crowdsourcing fall into this category.
With the passion side you have places like Threadless (art on t-shirts), Etsy (selling handmade items) and Sellaband (music funding). Again, there are a ton more examples here but I do feel like there are a lot less than on the labor side. And it’s not all positive on this side either. There has been controversy with passion crowdsourcing projects like iStockphoto (stock photography) where professional photographers feel they have a hard time competing with $1 amateur photographs.
It seems like the key difference between these two sides is that on the labor side, people are generally making things and doing work specifically for the project. On the passion side, people are making these things anyway and are then given an opportunity to do something productive with those things. In turn, I feel the passion side is generally more about support and opportunity to the crowd while the labor side is about using a crowd to solve your own problems.
My view on the whole thing is that, personally, I hope to always stay on the passion side as that interests me far more. However, I do see plenty of opportunity and great things happening on the labor side.
Anyway, I think I could write about this forever and just wanted to outline my most basic thoughts here. I’d love to discuss further in the comments…
I love the labor/passion distinction. I think you’re right that most forms of crowdsourcing can be split between the two. I also agree that good things can come out of both sides.
I wonder if a further way to identify “bad” versus “good” (using the terms loosely) crowdsourcing models is to look at the overall health of the community. If the community is growing and you can find old members as excited to be a part of it as new members, something positive is happening. If, however, there is a higher reliance on new community members to carry the load for members that have burned out or left dissatisfied, then the model is probably a negative one.
Ever community (or crowd) will have some churn, but the good ones should grow and open up new opportunities for their members along the way.
For discussion purposes, I’m going to stay on the ‘passion’ side for now. Threadless is a unique example – in that the crowdsourcing does tap into people’s passions and your users gladly spend their time (hidden labor) to create works of art to be featured on the t-shirts. The Threadless rewards – both monetary and recognition – are greater here than in most other venues though.
Most of your users are very talented graphics folks who have a variety of skills – one of which being cool vector art. They make a living with all their talents – and spend their free time expressing their ‘passion’ and supplement their income via one aspect of what makes them great.
I would argue that professional photographers and writers rely more heavily on a core talent which is obviously writing and photography. If other amateur writers and photographers (iStockphoto and Associated Content) continue to crowdsource their work – these true professionals will find their opportunities dwindling – and find that permanent positions are being eliminated, and contract positions being farmed out to the cheapest source.
Threadless artists are true artists “working on the side”. They are most often professional graphics folks that do not feel any competition from potential amateurs.
The above mentioned photographers and writers do – however. My brother-in-law is an unemployed (now freelance) writer who can’t find work and is relying on the desire of industry professionals not to contribute to these ‘hack job’ crowdsourcing options that don’t pay well and dilute the options for actual talented people.
Using my previous example about Threadless folks taking one aspect of their talent – I mentioned ‘vector art’. It’s not like professional writers and photographers can use one minor skill to supplement their income – like aperture selection or grammar usage to make an extra dime.
Yo Jason! Interesting thoughts… some counterpoints. First I don’t think that vector art for an illustrator is similar to aperture selection as a photographer. An illustrator makes illustrations just as a photographer creates photographs, it’s not really just one aspect of their talent… it’s their core talent. Plus Threadless doesn’t just accept vector art, you could submit a watercolor painting, a photograph, or even a full color photoshop piece.
Second, I really don’t think the industry is at the point now where people can’t get jobs in writing and photography because of crowdsourcing. Threadless is a great example of this as well. We have a staff photographer and a staff writer with no plans to outsource those positions to the crowd. Most shops are not at the point that they want to do that yet. The impact crowdsourcing has had on the industry so far that I’ve seen is that places that could not afford a photographer or writer before are now able to get some of that done. I argue that the big guys haven’t changed their ways in a meaningful way to hurt the industry yet.
Interesting boiled down dichotomy of crowdsourcing Jake. Though I think no matter which camp you fall in, it is most important to consider the impact these models have on the foundational stakeholders, namely the “crowd.” Grant made a good comment about this, that the health of the crowd is the best metric of long-term viability. Coincidently as you have noted, their seems to be greater propensity for “labor crowdsourcing” companies to neglect the needs of the crowd over self-gratifying needs of the company and/or end clients working in this model. This of course creating an unsustainable model of business – piss of the crowd that the company leans on and the company will topple over.
Personally as a company (Napkin Labs) that acknowledges the importance of passion and each community members satisfaction of our platform and innovation experience, I say let these companies continue to operate as they stubbornly do and let natural selection weed out their malpractices.
Survival of the fittest. The crowd knows best.
Great points Jake, and I think I oversimplified the skill of illustration inadvertently. Instead, my point was to show how your crowdsourced illustrators are potentially multi-disciplinarians who use their shared love of illustration to make money on the side. Their welfare depends on not only illustration, but various X’s, Y’s, and Z’s. They seemingly take one subset of their talents to make illustrations for t-shirts.
Contrary to that then was my photography example – whereby photographers can’t necessarily take a subset of their skill – like composition, depth of field, aperture selection, various post-production techniques, etc…to directly make them extra money. It’s still all photography.
I think Illustrators are less likely to get “overtaken” by amateurs due to it being an art that needs to be developed over time. Photography (and maybe writing too) are more prone to aspects like being at the right location at the right time, luck, reading up on technique, etc…
And you hit the nail on the head…I might have pessimistically been forecasting a trend shift. But you nailed it with “yet”. Hopefully like Warren said, companies will not start “neglecting the needs of the crowd over self-gratifying needs of the company”.
I make this distinction differently. I think of one effort as end users contributing “excess capacity” versus buying new. Tapping into people’s excess capacity is a good thing — “people were going to do it anyway” you say.
In those cases where people are creating or buying new, crowdsourcing can be problematic because now the cost/benefit analysis has to ultimately, in the long run, come out in the positive.
I’ve written and talked a lot about this recently. See these blog entries.
http://networkmusings.blogspot.com/2010/07/tapping-end-user-content-20-for-speed.html