Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing have change the ways of how companies can get things or find out opinions of their products. Specifically, companies now use crowdsourcing to get cheap things that they can use, or using fans opinion of what is good, and what is not good. In the text, The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” by Jeff Howe, it says, “He offered the museum a generous discount: $100 to $150 per photograph…  After several weeks of back-and-forth, Menashe emailed Harmel to say that, regretfully, the deal was off. “I discovered a stock photo site called iStockphoto,” she wrote, “which has images at very affordable prices.” That was an understatement. The same day, Menashe licensed 56 pictures through iStockphoto—for about $1 each.iStockphoto, which grew out of a free image-sharing exchange used by a group of graphic designers, had undercut Harmel by more than 99 percent. How? By creating a marketplace for the work of amateur photographers—homemakers, students, engineers, dancers. There are now about 22,000 contributors to the site, which charges between $1 and $5 per basic image.” Because of crowdsourcing, Menashe was able to find a cheaper alternative to get the photos she wanted. Instead of paying 600 dollars for 4 photos, she could’ve find a photo that cost 1 dollar each. This help changes the way companies approach creating content, or paying someone to create content for them, because they can use people who only do it for a hobby, or is just starting to do these type of work, and get it for free or for very cheap. A positive in this is the companies can save money, and not have to pay a pro a lot of money when they can get it for free elsewhere, or pay for very little for maybe the same type of photos. A negative is that since they are amateurs, the content may be bad, or worse than what a professional would make for their content. Then again, their are websites and the companies can have people look for the best content in these websites, and use those contents. This help companies out the most, while leaving people who would of made a lot of money from the content they made 20 years ago, out of luck.

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