Companies are now competing with amateur individuals thanks to crowdsourcing. As the article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” explains, people no longer need to rely on stock photographers because of websites like iStock. Rather than paying the photographer directly, individuals can pay a fraction of the price for photos taken by amateurs on websites like iStockphoto, Shutterstock, and other microstock agencies. Another example included the Mechanical Turk, Amazons web-based crowdsourcing marketplace that helps companies find people to perform tasks which computers cannot. Sunny Gupta, manager of the company iConclude, would pay $2,000 to outsource the writing of his repair flows. After hearing about the Mechanical Turk, he paid $5 to have a flowchart created by one of their Turkers, one which would have cost him $2,000.
Similarly, in The Atlantic article “The Blurring Line Between Amateur and Professional”, the author explains that in today’s society people have become creators through their tweets, blogs, YouTube videos and even comments left on social media. Because everyone can become a creator of content, the line between professional and amateur biomes blurred, leaving the professionals at loss. Companies are now seeing this, and are questioning if they should be paying journalists to create content when amateurs are willing to do it for free. While this is great news for regular individuals like us, the professions in media are not too pleased.
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How do you see professionals cashing in on the crowdsourcing movement?