Crowdsourcing: Why I’m Not Getting Paid for This

Everyone knows the Wikipedia debate- is it a reliable, factual, source if all of the information is contributed by ordinary people? Whatever its academic veracity, Wikipedia is notable for the breadth and scope of its information- all contributed by unpaid volunteers. Rarely organizations are able to so effectively convince individuals to contribute their time and effort- entirely unpaid- to something with little direct personal benefit.

Genius operates under a similar system- except for the surprisingly small number of staff, all of the annotations are contributed by unpaid volunteers. This raises one very important question: How do you convince people to become high-volume contributors?

The answer to the first is hard to specifically define. At some level it is the dilemma faced by anything online- how do we convince people to visit our website, and then come back again later. For Genius, the answer is all in the community. Once you spend a lot of time on the site, you develop friendships and a network of people who will comment on and contribute to your work. While most of this is spontaneous, a lot of the way Genius is set up is designed to promote this. The most obvious examples are Genius chat, the forums, and the practice of coaching new users, but this can also be found in the many ways users interact around annotations- upvotes, sharing annotations, replies, and suggestions. All of these encourage people to interact, but also subtly maintain the quality of annotations.

The other way that Genius encourages contributors to make a high volume of annotations is the IQ system. Each annotation gives the author IQ- Genius’s version of meaningless internet points. The more you write, the more points you get, and the results are posted in leaderboards throughout the site. There are genre-wide leaderboards, but also lists for the top scholars on every artist and album. This sort of video game mentality is the sort of motivation that should be meaningless, but has a remarkably effective way of encouraging people to increase their contributions to the site.

So- what’s the point of all this? Basically, crowdsourcing is a really effective means of convincing a lot of people to work for you without having to pay them. From the user’s perspective, it’s a subtle manipulation of our emotions, but, since we’re all still here, it’s obviously worth it.

As always, the annotated version of this post can be found here.