iStockPhoto and the rise of crowdsourcing
Jeff Howe, a crowdsourcing commentator, first wrote about the topic for Wired. His examples neatly describe the impact of crowdsourcing in several industries. I’ll paraphrase one story here to give you an idea of how the web is enabling crowdsourcing solutions to better solve real world problems.
He describes the story of Claudia Menashe, a project director at the National Health Museum in Washington, DC. She was creating an exhibition devoted to pandemics like swine flu and wanted some photographs to accompany the displays. The museum was on a tight budget, so rather than commission a photographer to capture new, exclusive images, she wanted to use existing stock – images that photographers have already taken and are available for multiple clients to use.
She eventually found a freelance photographer specialising in the health industry. Leveraging the non-profit status of the museum, Claudia managed to negotiate down the price to $100 to $150 per photograph. About half of what a corporate client would pay.
After several weeks Claudia emailed the photographer to say that, regretfully, she had to pull out of the deal. “I discovered a stock photo web site called iStockPhoto,” she wrote, “which has images at very affordable prices.” Claudia makes a pretty modest understatement here, as she found over 50 suitable images for about $1 each.
iStockPhoto, which started as an image sharing service for photographers, undercut an independent photographer by at least 99%. How? By building a community of amateur photographers around a marketplace for their photos. With the price of digital cameras and SLRs tumbling, the ability to take great photos has become widespread. Combined with power of the web to instantly share and distribute digital content around the world, the photography industry was ripe for crowdsourcing led reform. Professional photographers have since lost a lot of business to iStockPhoto and a host of similar online stock photography collections.
Alongside iStockPhoto there are several successful and interesting creative industry examples – Sellaband and Threadless are worth visiting. Wikipedia is the classic and arguably most successful implementation – read my post on Wikipedia here. Apple’s App Store and Facebook’s similar app development platform are other recently well published examples.
What next then? At Careerworms we’re among the first to apply crowdsourcing to recruitment – the next industry to be transformed by the benefits of crowdsourcing?
