Crowdsourcing — the practice of pulling labor, content, judgment, or capital from a distributed pool of contributors over the internet — was coined by Wired's Jeff Howe in June 2006. Four years later it has moved from a magazine cover to a working category. iStockphoto for stock photography. 99designs for logos. Amazon Mechanical Turk for the gig nobody else wanted. Wikipedia for the reference layer. Kickstarter, launched in 2009, for the funding.
The Business Model Is Now Real
The 2006 skepticism — that crowdsourced work would be too uneven, too unmanageable, or too legally unclear to run a real business on — has been outrun by the data. iStockphoto, acquired by Getty Images in 2006 for $50 million, has become the reference stock library for the low-cost segment. 99designs is running organized logo and design contests at industrial scale. Mechanical Turk has become the labor layer behind a range of tasks — from data cleanup to image tagging — that used to be handled inside companies.
Wikipedia crossed 3 million English-language articles this year. The 2001 project has become the default reference layer for the open web, editorially maintained by an unpaid contributor base that no traditional publisher could afford to build.
The Communications Implication
For brand and communications teams, crowdsourcing changes two things. The first is the input layer — the crowd can now produce the creative work that used to require an agency. The Doritos "Crash the Super Bowl" contest, running since 2007, has produced Super Bowl spots submitted by unpaid consumers that have outperformed professionally-produced ads in USA Today's Ad Meter multiple years running. The second is the coverage layer — the audience is now the publisher, and every product launch, every crisis, every executive statement is covered by a distributed layer of bloggers, forum contributors, and independent commentators that operates faster than the traditional press.
The Failure Modes
Not every crowdsourced project produces the expected result. The failure modes are consistent. Poorly-defined briefs produce unusable output. Contests without proper incentive structures attract low-quality entries. Legal ambiguity around ownership and use rights of user-generated content produces disputes. And the assumption that the crowd will self-organize without editorial supervision produces the noise-to-signal problem that closed most of the first-wave attempts.
The projects that work share a common structure: a tight brief, a clear incentive, a credible reviewer, and a small paid staff running the operation behind the crowd. The "crowd" is the visible layer. The management is what makes it produce.
What This Means for Brands
Every brand should be running at least one crowdsourced program this year — a contest, a UGC campaign, a community brief, a co-creation initiative — for two reasons. The first is direct cost. Crowdsourced creative production is a fraction of the equivalent agency cost. The second is data. The submissions themselves are the market research. What the crowd produces about a brand is a diagnostic of how the brand is perceived.
The brands that treat crowdsourcing as a novelty produce novelties. The brands that treat it as a working input layer produce operational output at scale. Related reading in Marketing, Social Media, and Digital Marketing.
Written by
EPR Editorial Team
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
