Crowdsourcing

[tke71709]

Thought some of you might be interested in this...

How to Crowdsource Your Graphics, Naming & Coding
Date: Tuesday, January 26th at 9 PM Eastern
Register here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/901901403

Matt Mickiewicz, founder of Sitepoint, 99Designs and Flippa, will
show us the ins and outs of Crowdsourcing.

- Find out why the old model of outsourcing to an agency, freelancer
or eLance is broken
- Why you should never pay more than $300 for a logo for $1000 for a
full-blown custom WordPress Blog Theme
- Find out how to get a "crowd" competing to fulfill your creative
brief and do the best possible job for you
- Find out how to curate and manage the crowd when outsourcing
logo design, landing page design, or ad design
- Learn to run "naming" contests to come up with the name of your
next product, website, or eBook. Never again spend days
brainstorming & doing domain name lookups!

There is probably no better person to teach us about crowdsourcing then Matt. I have personally used his 99designs service many times. In fact the new Offervault logo and site design was conceived in a 99designs contest. This stuff really works!

[Clinton]

Excellent stuff. I've used 99designs and recommended it to others. Thanks for the heads up.

[catweasel]

I actually find this to be a poor example of crowd sourcing.. in fact it's really just competition running. You're not utilizing a "crowd", just asking for folks to compete for your business.
When I was in design school they told us to never participate in competitions such as these as they typically involve doing work for free in the hope of getting paid. Designers are required to submit design concepts at no charge, this is an enormous benefit to the competition holder as he gets a wide variety of solutions to choose from. Only when he's chosen a solution does he then pay a nominal amount for the right to use that design to the winner, all the other designers have contributed hours of work for no gain at all.

A better example of crowd sourcing is Mechanical Turk, a service provided by Amazon. Mechanical Turk is marketed as "artificial artificial intelligence", essentially you enlist the simultaneous services of hundreds, or thousands, of "work at home" folks from all over the world to work like ants at a particular problem. It might be that you have a brand new film review site and need a truck load individuals to post reviews before you launch in order to fill your site with content, so you submit your task to MT and 1000 people pick up a task each and post a review (or two) for 50 cents each ... in 24 hours your site is full of content. Everybody gets paid for the tasks they complete and you have definitely utilized a crowd.

[Clinton]

From a designer point of view, it's a bad deal (especially if you live in the third world and have access to highly paid work). I see Matt's talk as being targeted at the employer though. You still think that something like Mechanical Turk would be better? What if it's a job that requires originality and creativity like the ones in 99designs?

[tke71709]

Cat is just saying that 99 designs and the such isn't actually crowdsourcing, but a competition.

True, but crowdsourcing is the hot term right now so that's what they are going to use.

[Clinton]

Anyway knows what happened at this webinar?

While on the topic of crowdsouring, here's an interesting video on raising finance for an internet business. Should be particularly interesting for owners / monetisers of forums.

That's why I invited Sanjay Sabnani to talk about the way he raised money for his company, CrowdGather ... We also spent a lot of time talking about the business opportunities behind online forums and message boards, since CrowdGather's mission is to bring together and improve those communities.

There's a transcript there for those who don't like video. I've bookmarked it to go through again. Good stuff.

[benitez17]

Anyway knows what happened at this webinar?

While on the topic of crowdsouring, here's an interesting video on raising finance for an internet business. Should be particularly interesting for owners / monetisers of forums.

There's a transcript there for those who don't like video. I've bookmarked it to go through again. Good stuff.

Great read. Thanks for providing it.

It was of particular interest to me because I have been doing some research about going public to have something besides cash to use for acquisitions. I have not seen many articles with positive things to say about reverse mergers, so it was helpful to get a first hand perspective.

[Clinton]

And his basic idea is pretty neat too. To summarise for those who didn't go through the whole page, he argues that forums are bottom of the pecking order when it comes to earning money and it shouldn't be so. Forums get lower CPMs than content sites, blogs, everything else. And I agree with him - that's one reason why, apart from this non-profit forum, I don't go for forums.

But he knows that forums are powerful communities and represent collective bargaining power. He figures it's all in the numbers. So he went mopping up forums and has now got 60-70 million monthly page views. That represents a huge buying base and allows him to negotiate favourable rates with advertisers, the same advertisers who won't deal individually with those same small forums.

[benitez17]

And his basic idea is pretty neat too. To summarise for those who didn't go through the whole page, he argues that forums are bottom of the pecking order when it comes to earning money and it shouldn't be so. Forums get lower CPMs than content sites, blogs, everything else. And I agree with him - that's one reason why, apart from this non-profit forum, I don't go for forums.

But he knows that forums are powerful communities and represent collective bargaining power. He figures it's all in the numbers. So he went mopping up forums and has now got 60-70 million monthly page views. That represents a huge buying base and allows him to negotiate favourable rates with advertisers, the same advertisers who won't deal individually with those same small forums.

I've been doing the same thing, without the focus on forums because they just seem too risky for me. I'm nowhere near his scale yet, but I am starting to get big enough that ad networks are giving me some attention and favorable treatment.

His story gives me something to aspire to, and made me feel like I am heading down the right path. Thanks again for posting this.

[Clinton]

Excellent news.

Tricky with forums. But there are options other than mopping up other forums to gain width. You can become a market leader.

Like Webmasterworld where they earn money from the conferences. And Sitepoint where they earn from publishing and selling books. And, Flippa, where they earn money from ... ok, forget that bit