Crowdsourcing: Pros, Cons, and More

By Darren Stevens. in Culture. Updated on March 31, 2022.

Say you’re starting a new online shopping site, and you imported thousands of products. Now you need to tag and categorize them, a job that seems tedious and will take many hours of work.

You could do it all by yourself, or you could outsource it to the crowd, and the action of outsourcing a task to the undefined public is recognized as crowdsourcing.

In crowdsourcing, you can outsource the task to not only a small group of person, but also tens of thousands of people. That’s the genuine advantage of crowdsourcing, bringing in mass intelligence to solve problems of all kinds at affordable prices.

The question is, is it brilliant to use crowdsourcing? What are the tasks well suited for crowdsourcing? What are the quality crowdsourcing services?

In this post, I’m going to tackle these questions.

History of Crowdsourcing

The term “crowdsourcing” was coined by Jeff Howe back in 2006 in a Wired article, which described a new way of sourcing people who are willing to help or work on a project. Enough people with sufficient time can transform into a lot of available workforces.

For small, manual tasks such as tagging vast amounts of photos, instead of outsourcing to a large company, it’s more feasible and affordable to use a crowdsourcing marketplace like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Despite being a somewhat new term, “crowdsourcing” has existed in our society for years in many forms.

For instance, a video game’s beta invitation is a form of crowdsourcing, where a developer releases a beta version of the game to the public for testing. This has been going on in the software world for years, where specific software is tested by crowdsourcing companies, while others are tested publicly.

Crowdsourcing is often used for translation service.

For instance, Facebook has been using crowdsourcing to translate its website into different languages since 2008. Wikipedia can be categorized as crowdsourcing as well: an encyclopedia written by people from all over the world, professionals and amateurs alike.

Crowdsourcing has been with us for a while, and now, it just got a catchy name.

Companies nowadays not only employ Research and Development (R&D) teams but list the problems they’re working on to the public as an attempt to get help from anyone.

Some companies even offer huge prizes for solving a problem on crowdsourcing sites like InnoCentive, and the cost is relatively cheap compared to employing a colossal R&D team.

Types of Crowdsourcing

Crowdfunding: Projects are funded by a large group of people, like most charity events. Kickstarter is a great example, in which millions of dollars are funded into all kinds of projects, from movies to gadgets – with all the funds coming from people interested in supporting the project.

Crowdsourced Design

Projects are funded for a large group of people to design something, for example, a website. This has the negative effect of “too many chefs in the kitchen”.

Crowd Wisdom

This is where users ask questions in front of a large pool of people willing to answer, like Yahoo Answers. A more serious form of crowd wisdom can be found at InnoCentive, which is a community where large corporations post technical or scientific problems to people who can help to solve the questions.

More famous examples of crowdsourcing include the Netflix Prize, where Netflix invited people to improve their collaborative filtering algorithm and offered a $1 million prize for it.

The Pros and The Cons

Using crowdsourcing brings some genuine advantages to companies and individuals looking to complete defined tasks at an affordable price.

The main attraction so far has been its somewhat lower price compared to the price of hiring a dedicated professional. Also, the best thing with the low price is the high number of people who are ready to work for you anytime.

As with all things, there are disadvantages, and interestingly the main disadvantage mirrors the main advantage: cheap labor results in less credible products compared to professionals. You pay professionals for their expertise, experience, and dedicated spirit, but you buy labor for completing simple tasks.

Any task considered above simple is risky for crowdsourcing.

With the crowdsourcing also comes the issue of management. In most cases, you have to manage a large scale of workers, which pretty much waste more of your time for control instead of a solution. Besides, it’s difficult for collaboration between crowd members as they compete with each other.

Worst of all, there’s no contract in most crowdsourcing cases. Workers can run anytime they want, and your design might be reused at any time.

Uses of Crowdsourcing

As previously mentioned, crowdsourcing is best suited for simple tasks.

For instance, crowdsourcing is an excellent option for web designers and designers, in general, to get some usability feedback on their work before making it public. If you’re looking for a new logo, hiring a professional designer is an option.

Still, if you are a startup and you cannot afford such a professional, you can consider placing a competition on the crowdsourcing site to get the product at an affordable price.

Anyone building a vast library of photos, products, etc., can easily take advantage of crowdsourcing features.

You may be building a new online shopping site, where you could use crowdsourcing and pay a few cents for people to describe, categorize, or tag the inventory. Or perhaps you’re working on new website design, you could ask people to fill out a questionnaire regarding the original design, and from there you can get some inspiration.

So you see, crowdsourcing sounds not that bad unless you’re into a very serious work like developing a mobile game or corporate e-commerce site, which requires not only expertise but intensive management.

Tips for using crowdsourcing

You already know the advantages and disadvantages of using crowdsourcing, but in the end, it all comes down to two things: what your problem is, and how much you are willing to pay for the solution.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when outsourcing jobs to the crowd:

Be specific

Make sure to make a detailed list of what the person is supposed to do. If you’re looking for feedback on a design, don’t ask, “what do you think?” but be specific like, “Is the text readable? Do you see any layout errors? Does the page load fast?”

Don’t be too cheap

Crowdsourcing is cheap, but it follows the same formula of other jobs: the more you ask from the people, the more you have to give in return. If you ask the people to spend 10 minutes filling out a questionnaire, it’s unreasonable to offer them 10 cents. Hardly anyone would bite on that deal, and those who do, the results won’t be useful to you.

Have a way of verifying the results

When outsourcing to a large crowd of non-professional workers, the results can vary greatly. Make sure to state in the job description about what skill or knowledge is required from the user.

Weigh your options

Instead of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, consider using dedicated crowdsourcing services for things like usability testing. While they certainly cost more, they are a lot more likely to yield better results.

Finally, you don’t necessarily have to use a crowdsourcing service if there is any person around you who is interested in helping you out for minor tasks such as getting essential feedback on a design. You can also share the design with your fellow designers or post it on a portfolio site like Dribble and ask for feedback.

Popular Crowdsourcing sites

There has been a boom in sites and services that offer the power of the crowd to everyone, from individuals needing a simple logo for their website to large corporations looking to solve some of their toughest problems.

Below are some popular crowdsourcing sites in which you can seek their help for any of the related tasks.