Moving the crowd at iStockphoto: The composition of the crowd and motivations for participation in a crowdsourcing application

By Daren C. Brabham. First Monday, 2008

336 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem solving and production model already in use by for-profit organizations such as Threadless, iStockphoto, and InnoCentive. Speculation in Weblogs and wisdom of crowds theory assumes a diverse crowd engaged in crowdsourcing labor. Furthermore, and as crowdsourcing is in some ways similar to open source software production, prior research suggests that individuals in the crowd likely participate in crowdsourcing ventures to gain peer recognition and to develop creative skills. The present study tests these assumptions in the crowdsourcing community at iStockphoto. An online survey obtained 651 responses from iStockers to demographic and motivations questions. Results indicate that the desire to make money, develop individual skills, and to have fun were the strongest motivators for participation at iStockphoto, and that the crowd at iStockphoto is quite homogenous and elite. These data have implications for future research into crowdsourcing, particularly regarding notions of professionalism and investment in online communities.

Subfields: Communication, Computer Science Applications, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/155d5456fd5c699ae2056aa089f35a9189874a49

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Citations in the corpus

MOVING THE CROWD AT THREADLESS (2010, background): “…data begin to explain the many reasons why crowds participate in crowdsourcing applications (Lakhani et al. 2007; Lietsala & Joutsen 2007; Brabham 2008b), but these data are conflicting, especially regarding how important the opportunity to make money is as a motivator across varying…”
Evaluation on crowdsourcing research: Current status and future direction (2012, background): “Many non-profit organizations have adopted crowdsourcing as an effective model for problem-solving (Brabham 2008a, 2010; Brito 2008).”
Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition (2012, methodology): “The most frequently cited definitions are the ones proposed by Howe [1], Brabham [23], and Wikipedia [24].”
Suggesting frameworks of citizen-sourcing via Government 2.0 (2012, background): “According to the literature on crowd-sourcing (Brabham, 2008a; Brito, 2008; Ghosh, 1998; Hertel, Niedner, & Hermann, 2003; Howe, 2006, 2009; Lévy, 1997), the rationale of collective wisdom is that prudent crowds insist on the presence of non-experts or dabblers, who are neither professionals nor…”
More than fun and money. Worker Motivation in Crowdsourcing - A Study on Mechanical Turk (2011, background): “…and Wolf (2005)) and specific domains of crowdsourcing like user generated content (e.g. Schroer and Hertel (2009) about Wikipedia) or competitions (Brabham, 2008; Leimeister, Huber, Bretschneider, and Krcmar, 2009), we are not aware of research on the comparison of different motivational aspects…”
Managing the Crowd: Towards a Taxonomy of Crowdsourcing Processes (2011, background): “Apart from remuneration, such mechanisms are mostly specific to different applications of crowdsourcing – e.g., idea competitions (Leimeister et al., 2009), user-generated content (Brabham, 2008; Schroer and Hertel, 2009), or design competitions (Brabham, 2010) – and therefore exceed the scope of…”