Paid crowdsourcing
Paid crowdsourcing is a professionalized form of crowdsourcing in which a crowd of Internet users carry out tasks and projects for companies for a fee, without being permanently employed by them.
Paid crowdsourcing is a growing work model in the connected world. There are now numerous paid crowdsourcing companies that specialize in placing orders from companies with Internet users and taking care of the processing, payment and control of projects.
Companies are increasingly using the system in order to save time and money by employing as many workers as possible.
Procedure and methods
Professional paid crowdsourcing companies differ in their offers and the method used or the process of placing and carrying out contracts. Usually, the customer's orders are first broken down into individual microtasks (small tasks) by the crowdsourcing company and then processed by a mass of internet users, the so-called clickworkers . Each “Clickworker” who has completed the task correctly then receives a pre-determined fee or payment for the work performed.
With paid crowdsourcing in the areas of design and innovation, the orders are usually awarded to the Clickworkers in the form of tenders. The Clickworker who submits the best work or the best proposal receives the award and a fee for his work.
Possible uses
Paid crowdsourcing is used particularly for projects and tasks that can hardly be solved by computers and for which there is not enough manpower within the company.
An example of this is the division of large amounts of data into categories (is the customer request an order, a complaint or a request?) Or researching several thousand data on the Internet. Paid crowdsourcing companies offer solutions for these and other tasks, especially in the areas of text & content, ordering & structuring, web research & surveys as well as design & innovation .
Frequent jobs include:
- Writing product descriptions for online shops and catalogs
- Creation of editorial and search engine optimized texts for websites
- Writing instructions for PC and video games
- Writing of software descriptions
- Reviews and travelogues
- Creation of glossary texts
- Translation of all types of text
- Categorization of web content
- Categorization of products for online shops
- Keywording of articles
- Categorization of archive data
- Tagging of pictures and videos
- Research of address data and opening times
- Research of product information and prices
- Research of manufacturer data and competitor information
- Classic market research surveys
- Functionality check
- Testing websites
quality control
Many professional paid crowdsourcing companies have developed measures to ensure the quality of work results. As a rule, Internet users who want to work on paid crowdsourcing platforms must register in advance and state their knowledge and skills. In most cases, they also have to qualify for the respective tasks with tests or small work samples. After completing the tasks, the results are usually checked for legality, for example in the form of a plagiarism check for texts that have been created.
Often the company also offers to have the results created by the member checked and corrected by one or two other people.
criticism
The employer responsibility is usually not borne by the paid crowdsourcing company, so that the participants are ultimately small businesses if their annual profit in Germany remains below € 17,000 or possibly also bogus self-employed . They are responsible for social, pension and health insurance, the procurement and maintenance of work and production equipment and any tax law issues. Some paid crowdsourcing companies have their headquarters abroad and therefore do not pay into the German tax system, although they skim off profits here. Therefore, the criticism is sometimes expressed that the sharing economy is ultimately the parallel development of a capitalist labor market that has the potential to undermine the social market economy and thus terminate the German social contract.
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c d Christian Lanzerath: Paid crowdsourcing: micro jobs for home workers. ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. On September 30, 2010 on heute.de as well as crowdsourcing ( memento of the original from March 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at internetworld.co.uk
- ↑ a b The creativity is out there. In: Die Welt compact from December 3, 2010
- ↑ a b Information from the clickworker.com platform
