Crowdsourcing: Mining the masses for the next big thing
You are the future of the entertainment industry. So's your neighbor, and that person across the breakfast table. At least that's what the proponents of "crowdsourcing" believe.
Crowdsourcing essentially means throwing your arms open to the Internet community and inviting them to help create content or software. Often, there is prize money involved, but sometimes people pitch in for fun or glory (see The Internet Movie Database, originally built by users before it was acquired by Amazon.com).
Frito-Lay tried crowdsourcing last year, when it invited any wanna be advertising execs to create a Super Bowl ad for its Doritos brand chips. The company received more than 1,000 entries, and the finalists were virtually indistinguishable from a TV spot that a Madison Avenue agency would've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce. The snack-maker, by dangling a $10,000 prize and the promise of Super Bowl airtime, got to pick the best ad out of a very large pack.
Bands like The Decemberists and Modest Mouse have invited fans to craft music videos, using a library of raw footage they provide. Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who owns a pair of high-definition cable channels, recently put out a call on his blog for ideas for new shows. MTVu, the college cable network run by MTV, recently doled out $30,000 grants to teams of college students who are creating new software that could eventually be integrated into the MTVu website.
"Hobbyists, part timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd," Wired Magazine observed last year, in a story titled "The Rise of Crowdsourcing."
"The labor isn't always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees."
Crowdsourcing isn't entirely new of course. Companies have long held contests to come up with advertising slogans, and way back in 1714, the English Parliament offered a cash prize -- the equivalent of several million dollars in today's money -- to the person who could figure out how to accurately determine longitude while at sea.
But we're living at a moment where everything from "Dancing with the Stars" to the X Prize, which enticed several teams to try to design a reusable spacecraft, seems to invite participation.
Even Netflix Inc., the Silicon Valley company that re-imagined the way movie rental ought to work, is offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can improve the way it makes personalized movie recommendations by at least 10 percent.
For MTVu, its crowdsourcing strategy, called the Digital Incubator, is a way of staying in tune with the site's young customer base.
"College students are so far ahead of us, in consuming media and using it in different ways, that we wanted to figure out how we could partner with them," says Stephen Friedman, general manager of MTVu. "We said, there are no rules. Tell us what your idea of the digital future is."
A team at New York University created RapHappy, a site where visitors can form groups, record raps, and start battles among themselves.
Students at Brown University built Osiris, which automatically generates a music video for a song, using photos from the site Flickr that are related to the song's lyrics.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the grant-winning project was Selectricity, a new kind of ranked-choice voting system.
"MTV isn't entirely sure how they're going to use it, but they may use it in some of the contests that they run," says Benjamin Mako Hill, a graduate student at MIT's Media Lab, and leader of the Selectricity team. MTV isn't shelling out a lot of money, Hill says, but it's enough to allow him to hire two programmers and a designer this summer to improve the software; he's hoping to eventually turn Selectricity into a stand alone company. Eventually, one of the MTV-backed projects will be picked to receive $100,000 in further funding. While MTV gets exclusive rights to showcase any software created in the program for a year, the students retain ownership of it.
Geoffrey Hinton is a computer science professor at the University of Toronto who is competing, along with three of his students, for Netflix's million-dollar movie recommendation prize. He's not even sure a 10 percent improvement is possible: "It's not even clear that God could do it," he says, because there is so much variability in how Netflix users rate the movies that they watch. "Ask them how they would rate a movie they've just seen, and it's likely to be different if they've just stubbed their toe," Hinton says.
Still, the ability to show off the team's software development skills is one incentive, and the money is another. "Even if Netflix spent $1 million hiring programmers," Hinton says, "I'm not sure they'd get as much value as they're getting with this competition."
( There seem to be more than 600 teams competing for the Netflix prize. Hinton's group of Torontonians is currently in third place.)
Of course, while crowdsourcing seems like a positive trend for companies that can now cast a global net for talent, and a welcome opportunity for unproven up-and-comers, it may not be so wonderful for anyone who is already working as a professional programmer, music video director, TV development executive, or anything else.
"The idea behind crowdsourcing is, let's be honest, getting people to work for you for free," says Josh Oakhurst, a filmmaker and blogger who lives in Portland, Ore. Oakhurst has in the past submitted a homemade ad to a contest run by Southwest Airlines. "They're asking for a lot without offering much in return," he says.
Could crowdsourcing ever yield a massive TV hit like "Seinfeld," a memorable music video like Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer," or an ad that gets talked about for years, like Apple's "1984" commercial? I'm inclined to think that some of the best creative output doesn't happen within the constraints of a competition, or in response to a financial incentive. But it may also be too early to assess the true power of crowdsourcing.
Scott Kirsner is a freelance writer in San Francisco who maintains a blog on entertainment and technology, cinematech.blogspot.com. He can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. 