If you’re a freelancer, chances are you’ve come across the term crowdsourcing. You may have investigated the meaning of this obscure term or you may have had that inevitable feeling of dread that caused your stomach to turn so much that you simply didn’t want to know. Whatever the case, crowdsourcing remains a constant threat to the arts industry — primarily for professional designers and writers. It also does a great disservice to any client who expects a quality job. As creative professionals, it is our job to fight the menace that is crowdsourcing.

• Crowdsourcing drives down wages even further. Think $5 articles are bad? Just wait until until they want to pay you a meager 50 cents an article. It’s already happening and its frightening.
• The odds of your work getting chosen are slim. Crowdsourcing is nothing more than one, big contest designed to screw over the professionals, cheat the clients, and make the crowdsourcing sites a killing.
• Crowdsourcing breeds copyright issues and that is harmful for everyone involved. Well, you know what they say about beggars not being choosers. Do these people honestly believe that they are going to get quality, original work for free? Most “creative professionals” on these websites simply plagiarize or copy material. No incentive = lazy work.
• The client loses the most. If the client is unaware that they are using copyrighted material as a logo, there could be a lawsuit against them. Even if the client doesn’t get bogus work produced, chances are that the design or ad copy really suck. I mean, we are talking about people doing free work, afterall. You can’t take shortcuts when it comes to labor and expect to have anything good come out of it.
• It destroys industry. Photographers, illustrators, and designers have been hit pretty hard by the internet slave trade known as crowdsourcing. The wages have been driven so low, that several truly talented creative professionals have permanently left their businesses behind. When people talk about the American dream, its difficult not to sigh and declare with a bitter smile “What American dream?” Indeed, the corporate quest for cheap labor has destroyed more than just industry.

I am saddened when I hear of fellow freelancers perpetuating this crowdsourcing trend. Its even more destructive than the East Asian outsourcing. Now instead of cheap labor, people want free labor. How long will we let corporations and their greed make slaves of us?

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 25th, 2010 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.