The top 5 crowdsourcing trends

If you’re not familiar with crowdsourcing, it’s a new work process that involves getting a crowd of people to help with a task typically performed by one employee or contractor.

Imagine needing a new logo for your business. Rather than hire a freelancer, agency, or in-house designer, with crowdsourcing you can post your need and several designers will compete and create a custom logo for you.

While this is a common example, today crowdsourcing extends far beyond simple graphic design and can be broken down into four main subcategories:

As the early stages of crowdsourcing continue to gain momentum, there are a few trends worth keeping your eye on.

1. Curated crowds

The bigger your crowd doesn’t necessarily mean better output. This has been made apparent with the early days of crowdsourcing design sites. A design contest yielding 1,000 designs can become unmanageable. If you offer a prize large enough, any monkey with a crayon could contribute. I’m not saying a large crowd produces bad results, but there will be bad among the good. Luckily, there are almost always a lot of great designs, but it takes extra time to sift out the bad.