Final thesis - Master's degree in Marketing and Corporate Communication

1. UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO
FACOLTÀ DI SCIENZE POLITICHE
CORSO DI LAUREA MAGISTRALE IN
COMUNICAZIONE PUBBLICA E D’IMPRESA
THE USE OF CROWDSOURCING IN
TRADITIONAL MEDIA ENTERPRISES
Relatore: Prof. Gianfranco Prini Tesi di Laurea di
Correlatore: Prof. Luca Solari Enrico Grando
Matricola: 779612
Anno Accademico 2011/2012

3. There were never in the world two opinions
alike; anymore than two hairs or two grains.
The most universal quality is diversity.
Michel De Montaigne

5. TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 7
PART ONE 11
Chapter 1 - The rise of crowdsourcing 11
1.1 What Crowdsourcing is 11
1.2 The importance of the one percent 13
1.3 The role of cooperation 15
1.3.1 Barnard and his systems of cooperation as forerunner of
crowdsourcing theories 18
Chapter 2 - Examples of excellence in crowdsourcing 23
2.1 Threadless. Excellence in crowd-fashion 23
2.2 iStockPhoto. How stock photography has changed 25
2.3 InnoCentive. Crowdsourcing in R&D 28
Chapter 3 - Why people collaborate 31
3.1 Hard work, no money 31
3.2 The role of motivation 32
3.2.1 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs 32
Chapter 4 - Criticism and risks of crowdsourcing 35
4.1 Criticisms of the crowdsourcing concept 35
4.2 The debate about intellectual property 40
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6. PART TWO 43
Chapter 5 - Crowdsourcing in the television industry 45
5.1 Current TV 45
5.2 C6.tv. Glocal information in Italy 48
5.3 Utopia TV. Spanish journalists gathering around a new platform 50
5.4 YouReporter. Citizen journalism in Italy 53
5.5 Considerations about crowdsourcing in the television industry 54
Chapter 6 - Crowdsourcing in the movie industry 57
6.1 Life In A Day. The story of a single day on Earth 57
6.1.2 Interview with Andrea Dalla Costa, co-director of Life In A Day 61
6.2 Live Music. The crowd of animation 63
6.3 Considerations about crowdsourcing in the movie industry 65
Chapter 7 - Crowdsourcing in the press industry 67
7.1 CaféBabel. The European magazine 67
7.2 How newspapers can take advantage of the crowd 69
7.3 Considerations about crowdsourcing in the press industry 71
Chapter 8 - Crowdsourcing in advertising 73
8.1 Chevrolet and the Super Bowl 2012 73
8.2 Zooppa. An Italian example of excellence in advertising 75
8.3 Victors & Spoils. An ad agency, almost just like any other one 77
8.4 Considerations about crowdsourcing in advertising 79
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7. Chapter 9 - Crowdsourcing in radio enterprises 81
9.1 The web radio as a means of user participation 81
9.1.1 Spreaker. Users becoming deejays 83
9.2 Considerations about crowdsourcing in radio enterprises 84
CONCLUSIONS 87
ADDENDUM
Interview with Andrea Dalla Costa, co-director of Life In A Day 91
REFERENCES 99
WEBSITES 101
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9. INTRODUCTION
This thesis provides an analysis of the phenomenon of crowdsourcing,
theorized for the first time in 2006 by the journalist Jeff Howe, by studying its role
in traditional media enterprises.
The work is divided into two parts. The first part defines crowdsourcing and
analyzes the relevant literature. Special attention is paid to Jeff Howe’s book
“Crowdsourcing. How the Power of Crowd is Driving the Future of Business”,
which extensively analyzes the subject. We also study the role of cooperation and
how it changes organization environments. In section 1.3, we compare two
opposite points of view: from the one side, James Surowiecki’s vision of a wise
crowd able to solve problems individuals cannot solve, described in his 2007 book
“The wisdom of crowds”; from the other side, the completely different position
found in “The cult of the amateur” by Andrew Keen. Here, the author harshly
criticizes the whole concept of web 2.0, stating that it is destroying our culture and
our economy, throughout allowing anyone to participate, even without any
particular proficiency. Then, we introduce the theory of cooperation of Chester
Barnard, by seeing him as forerunner of crowdsourcing theories. In his book “The
functions of the executive” of 1938, Barnard studies cooperation as a means by
which people working in an organization can overtake their personal limitations.
In Chapter 2, we analyze the cases of Threadless, iStockPhoto and
InnoCentive, three completely different realities that allow us to understand how
crowdsourcing may be successfully applied to several diverse fields – i.e. fashion,
stock photography and scientific R&D, respectively.
The third chapter focuses on the role of motivation, trying therefore to
understand what motivates people to participate in crowdsourcing projects, also
where economic incomes are very low or even absents. Through studying
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we come to a conclusion, with the hypothesis that
crowdsourcing is a way through which people can satisfy their needs, allowing
them to find self-satisfaction by working in something they do like.
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10. Finally, the first part presents risks and criticisms about crowdsourcing
concept, by reporting the opinion shared by many people according to whom it is
a means of exploitation, through which firms obtain workforce and contributions
for free, or by paying only little money. Here, the above mentioned Keen’s opinion
has a central role, since he affirms that collaboration is leading us to an age of
mass mediocrity. However, Jeff Howe replies to this opinion by affirming that
instead of leading to mediocrity, crowdsourcing guides us toward a perfect
meritocracy, wherein anyone can participate and where every effort is valued for
what it actually is.
The second part of this work focuses on the real core of the thesis, which is
how crowdsourcing is used in traditional media enterprises. Every chapter studies
a specific medium, through the analysis of diverse projects, both successful and
unsuccessful.
In particular, the thesis describes the setting of television, cinema, press
industry, advertising and radio. At the end of each chapter, there are some short
considerations about how crowdsourcing is used in the respective medium, trying
to understand whether it can be a helpful solution or not.
We therefore discover how crowdsourcing projects can be suitable in
television programs but at the same time how some ideas turn out to be a failure,
because of legal and bureaucratic problems. We see how collaboration struggles
to be successfully used in radio enterprises, perhaps because of the nature of the
medium itself. On the other hand, it is pointed out how the press industry
presents several examples of capacity in taking advantage of the crowd and we
focus in the case of CaféBabel, a European online magazine. Regarding advertising,
we see how its need of creativity finds in the crowd a perfect source of innovation
and new ideas. Finally, large space is dedicated to cinema industry. This medium
seems to be the one where skills and knowledge of professionals are needed
most, but the success of Life In A Day (§ 6.1) shows how people from all over the
world can contribute to make a great movie, even though they do not use
professional instruments or the quality of images is not perfect.
8

11. The cases and experiences presented in this work belong to different
international realities. There are projects coming from United States and United
Kingdom, where crowdsourcing is more widespread, from Italy and from Spain,
due to my studying experience in Madrid during the first semester 2011/2012. In
this way, we also try to understand the differences among which crowdsourcing
projects are put into practice and we see if there are national contexts more
suitable than others for this subject.
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13. PART ONE
Chapter 1
The rise of crowdsourcing
1.1 What crowdsourcing is
The Encyclopædia Britannica does not provide a definition of the word
“crowdsourcing”. This is probably the most emblematic way through which we can
understand what it exactly is. Indeed a proper definition cannot find space in the
traditional and former most important encyclopedia of the world.
The term was first used in an article published in the magazine Wired in
2006 by the journalist Jeff Howe, “The rise of crowdsourcing” (Howe 2006), and it
is composed by the words Crowd and Outsourcing. The latter is an economic
definition that describes the arrangement made by an employer who decides to
hire a contractor outside his firm to perform part of the production process. This is
nowadays a widespread practice, since its nature may be very different and
therefore it can be applied to any production field. Through the outsourcing a firm
is able to improve his production chain, using an external source in order to realize
benefits. These can be sought in cost savings, improvement of quality, the
possibility to focus on the core business, the access to talent and to new
knowledge, the possibility to consult with experts and tax benefits.
Starting form this definition, crowdsourcing is a form of outsourcing given
to a multitude of people through the web. The concept of crowdsourcing is
defined by the crowd itself. The people give it a shape, being the makers, the
experts, the protagonists of the project.
Crowdsourcing is when a company takes a job that was
once performed by employees and outsources it in the
11

14. form of an “open call” to a large, undefined group of
people, generally using the internet.1
As a matter of fact, this is in nowadays reality a proper model of making
business. Through this practice, an organization of any nature may appeal to an
external community of users to participate in the creation of a content or to rate
the value of the contribution of the other users. It is basically a work made by
peers, by the people who benefit from the product or service itself.
Therefore, it is very important to set up and manage a network of people
who participate in an active and moreover spontaneous way to the project.
Technological advances broke down the cost barriers and as a
consequence, it results easier for everyone to own technology products. The
availability of these products reduces the boundaries between amateurs and
professionals and the spread of know-how makes everyone potentially able to
contribute to a product or service.
Moreover, those who have always performed a specific practice only as a
hobby, they now have the chance of leading their efforts to solve specific needs,
often helping those companies that have seen in crowdsourcing a way for
improving their knowledge.
From the firms’ perspective, crowdsourcing is of course a great chance,
since they can actually bring fresh innovation into their work and with very low
costs.
Crowdsourcing is a wide practice that Jeff Howe has subdivided into four
different categories: crowd wisdom or collective intelligence, crowd creation,
crowd voting and crowdfounding (Howe 2009).
The crowd wisdom contains the key principle of crowdsourcing, according
to which, the groups have more knowledge comparing to individuals. What
companies need to do is only creating the conditions in which people can express
1
Definition of Crowdsourcing provided by Jeff Howe. Taken from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0-
UtNg3ots
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15. themselves. The role of collective intelligence will be better analyzed later in this
thesis (§ 1.3).
The second category, the crowd creation, consists in allowing the crowd to
effectively create products or services. This is particularly interesting for the
purposes of this work and all the second part, when we will describe the use of
crowdsourcing in traditional media enterprises, contains example of this principle.
The crowd voting is maybe the most used form of collaboration. In this
case, people are required to judge and rank other people’s contributions. It results
very useful especially when there is need to organize a large amount of ideas.
Finally, crowdfounding consists in supporting a project throughout a
financial cooperation. Here, people help an organization, a company or generally
speaking a project, by economically participating in it. Crowdfounding is
particularly used in citizen journalism and scientific R&D, but of course, it is easy to
apply it in any crowdsourcing project.
1.2 The importance of the one percent
With the practice of crowdsourcing, each person becomes fundamental in
the creation of contents and anyone can potentially contribute to the final project,
evenly within his or her virtual co-workers. The success of the web 2.0 in all its
fields, may be them online videogames, blogs, internet forums and social
networking, confirms us that users do want to participate in the creation of
contents, they do want to make themselves their part.
Basically, crowdsourcing has noticed this users’ attitude and it has
developed it inside firms’ boundaries. What it is important then, is to be able to
pick the right crowd (Howe 2009). Alpheus Bingham, CEO and founder of
InnoCentive, an R&D company that will be described in the second chapter of this
thesis, stated that the optimum size of a user-base for crowdsourcing purposes is
around 5,000 people. Therefore, quoting Bingham himself,
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16. […] This means that if you can entice even one percent of
one percent of the crowd, you would still have twice as
many contributors as you ostensibly need. Now here’s the
bad news: it needs to be the right people.2
Being able to address the project to the right crowd is not easy at all. The
number of people around the world with an internet access is around two billion.
However, those who might actually be useful to the purpose are very few, but
anyway potentially more than the employees of the firm. This is related to picking
the right crowdsourcing model. In the web it is possible to find many different
kinds of crowd, hence organizations need to be capable to address their projects
to the right people, otherwise the search of collective knowledge would be
useless.
The interesting fact of crowdsourcing is that the one percent we
mentioned quoting Alpheus Bingham can really make the difference. In addition,
users who want to participate in the collective intelligence are constantly
increasing and consequently that one percent is bound to raise.
The Pew Research Center published in 2009 a survey reporting data about
the usage of internet between teenagers and young adults3. According to the
survey, ninety-three percent of teens daily accesses to the web and the
percentage increased of twenty points from 2000. Between these young people,
over the sixty percent of them creates contents for the web, throughout
cooperating with their peers. These data have clear implications for our economy.
When these teenagers will enter the working world, they will bring their natural
web proficiencies in the organizations, and therefore practices like crowdsourcing
and collective intelligence are bound to be always more used.
2
Howe 2009: 282.
3
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1484/social-media-mobile-internet-use-teens-millennials-fewer-
blog
14

17. The American science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, answering to
some people who stated that the ninety percent of science fiction is rubbish,
wrote that the ninety percent of everything, such as literature, cinema and
consumer goods, can be considered rubbish. This funny quotation that became
famous as Sturgeon’s law, results useful to describe the situation in
crowdsourcing. Since the ninety percent of contributions are worthless, there is
need to rely on the remaining ten percent, which often brings even to the one
percent. Numbers may hence appear rather meager, however, sometimes only
one contribution can be worth a project.
1.3 The role of cooperation
In 2004, the American journalist James Surowiecki published “The wisdom
of crowds”, a very interesting book where it is analyzed the central role of
cooperation inside our everyday culture. Surowiecki upholds the idea that large
groups of people are collectively smarter than a few experts, no matter how
brilliant they are considered. Afterwards, he continues describing four conditions
favoring the wisdom of the crowd: the diversity of opinion within the members,
the independence of people’s opinion, the decentralization of knowledge and the
mechanism of aggregation (Surowiecki 2007).
It is very interesting to compare Surowiecki and Keen’s opinions about
Google and how cooperation affects the most powerful search engine. According
to Surowiecki, when Google was born, in 1998, Yahoo! seemed to be the top
among search engines. After less than two years though, Google became far more
used than Yahoo!, overtaking also two other search engines at that time very
popular: AltaVista and Lycos. All internet users started to prefer Page and Brin’s
product, because it allowed them to find the sought page in less time. The reason
of its strength is indeed in the wisdom of crowds.
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18. Andrew Keen, in his “The cult of the amateur” (Keen 2007), utterly
disagrees with this opinion, moving a sharp criticism toward Google. He writes
that the giant of Mountain View does not provide us the most reliable and useful
information, but only the most popular one. Keen continues his analysis affirming
that Google is our electronic mirror, where we can find a registration of our
previous researches. Keen’s point of view will be analyzed also hereinafter in the
fourth chapter, when criticisms of the crowdsourcing concept will be studied.
Surowiecki keeps upholding his opinion by reporting the example of a
chess expert. This might know everything about chess, but maybe only about this.
He might be an extraordinary specific proficiency but it could be very limited. And
the game of chess requires specific and localized knowledge. For other kind of
knowledge, the expert’s opinion may result insufficient. Competences like decision
taking and political or strategic choices belong to very wide areas of knowledge
and therefore, it is difficult for a single person to become an expert in such fields.
All the experiences we have had so far bring us to believe that a group of people
can afford better these kinds of situations, and the shared knowledge leads them
to a better and smarter decision-making process.
Both Surowiecki and Howe use the example of ants’ colonies to explain
how important the role of cooperation can be. The author of “The wisdom of
crowds” quotes Steven Johnson and his book “Emergence: The connected lives of
ants, brains, cities, and software”, where the American popular science author
describes how ants behave even though there is no leader and any ant, separately,
knows almost nothing about where to go (Johnson 2001). Ants never act
individually and everything they do depends on the other insects. Of course,
humans can act individually as well, but ants serve as a good example to
understand the importance of cooperation. However, in order to take smart
decisions, the independence of people keeps being a central attribute, avoiding
errors to spread over the whole group, like in the case of ants wandering in circle
toward the death when they miss their colony and no one can lead the others. For
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19. this reason, it results that the most efficient groups are made up of people having
different points of view.
For the British edition of his book “Crowdsourcing. How the power of the
crowd is driving the future of business”, Jeff Howe decided to crowdsource the
cover design. He created a competition where anyone who wanted could submit
designs and the crowd would vote on their favorites. As a result, four hundred
artists uploaded their ideas and a crowd of around 10.000 people voted and chose
twenty finalists. After that, a jury, composed among the others by Howe himself,
selected the winning cover. It portrays indeed some ants. According to the jury of
the contest, ants represent a clever way of communicating the concept of the
book. Ants are “a sly reference to that particular insect’s use of distributed
cognition to accomplish tasks no individual ant could hope to perform.” (Howe
2009: 312).
Beyond this example, Jeff Howe stresses the point that the cooperation is
entering out lives is a continuously wider way, evolving itself and becoming
something absolutely natural. As demonstration of this, he suggests the example
of digital natives, who “live on the same planet of digital immigrants, but inhabit a
very different universe”. They are able to concentrate on multiple projects
simultaneously and to collaborate spontaneously with people they have never
met. For them, cooperation has always been something natural. As a
consequence, future generations will collaborate always more easily.
Many examples of the use of crowdsourcing will be presented ahead in this
thesis, but already from the first pages, it is possible to understand the changes in
organizational systems. The access to external workforce and the massive use of
collaboration bring to the evolution of human resources management inside the
enterprises. Employers and employees need to deal with a larger amount of
people, not anymore exclusively between themselves. They face new realities that
can also represent a threat in the organization. Therefore, companies will have to
modify their human resources management (HRM), in order to balance the risks
and the rewards of the new staffing model. Employees have new coworkers and
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20. the group dynamics change, increasing consequently the management complexity.
Those who are not able to deal with the new working structure and who do not
answer quickly to the need of change will find themselves with problems in the
management of the organization.
Moreover, the HRM finds itself with the need of developing new
proficiencies, which can be found once again within the crowd. If it is led toward
the right direction, the crowd is able to manage itself. Of course, there are risks of
failure, but we will see ahead, by analyzing excellence cases of crowdsourcing, that
sometimes the best results are obtained when the crowd is left free to collaborate
and participate.
Between the advantages brought by the collaboration, there is also the
underlying improvement of the customer relationship management (CRM), since
those who collaborate and participate in the creation of contents are often
customers of the organization, who want to improve products or services they will
buy or use afterwards. It starts a dialogue between clients and enterprises, leading
to a better relationship, especially through social media platforms. However, once
again, if this opportunity is not well managed, it can lead to a worsening of the
relationship.
1.3.1 Barnard and his systems of cooperation as forerunner of
crowdsourcing theories
In 1938, Chester Barnard published his most successful work, “The
functions of the executive”, anticipating somehow many theories which have
become the core of crowdsourcing projects (Barnard 1938).
For the purpose of this thesis, it is interesting to focus especially on the first
part of the book, where Barnard exposes a theory of cooperation and
organization. He looks at organizations as systems of cooperation where there is
need to be sought efficiency and effectiveness. The concept of effectiveness is the
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21. same as usual, that is being able to accomplish specific stated goals. With
efficiency though, he refers to the ability of an organization to satisfy the motives
of individuals, in order to allow the organization itself to last.
In the first stage of a cooperative system, choices taken by individuals have
personal nature. With a joint effort, the individual situation of each person
improves, thanks to the higher proficiency of the collaboration. At this point,
organizations reach efficiency when members find satisfaction in the cooperative
process, due to a shared pursued aim and a bigger confidence in the decisions.
According to Barnard, there is not any cooperative system without biological,
physical, personal and social elements.
Every individual action brings effectiveness to the cooperation and its
efficiency is made by the joint efforts of each one. If a person finds his motives
satisfied, he continues in the effort. Otherwise, the cooperative system cannot go
on. From this point of view, the efficiency of a collaborative process consists in
providing personal satisfactions for its members. Furthermore, in order to reach
efficiency, an organization needs to be able to share benefits between all the
people. The distribution process has to assure sufficient benefits for every
member of the cooperation. The amount of benefits can be either higher or lower
than those that would be achieved individually, therefore, quoting Barnard
himself:
[…] In the latter case, other satisfactions secured or
produced through cooperation are basis of efficiency.
These other satisfactions are social.4
Social benefits assume hence a crucial role in the collaborative process and
they can substitute material good as satisfaction elements. However, in the first
chapters of his work, Barnard analyzes the effectiveness of cooperation without
considering the social aspect. In this way, cooperation has its reason for being only
4
Barnard 1938: 61.
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22. when it can do what an individual cannot do, as a means of overcoming individual
limitations.
Systems of cooperation are never stable, because of changes in the
environment. Consequently, adjustments of cooperative systems imply a
management capable to reply to these changes and, in some organizations, proper
executive figures responsible for managing them. This concept results particularly
interesting if thought inside a crowdsourcing project. As it will be possible to see in
the paragraph about risks and criticisms of crowdsourcing (§ 4.1), the crowd needs
to be guided, but in the meanwhile there is the need of a management not too
intrusive, that leaves it space of direction and that can keep it inside the discussion
field. The proficiency of being able to answer these needs is one of the reasons
why in some environments crowdsourcing succeeds, whereas in others it does
not.
Cooperation introduces changes in individuals’ motives. When these
changes assume an unfavorable direction, they are not anymore positive to the
cooperation. In crowdsourcing, this may represent a risk. Cooperation is useful
only when it improves the motivation of participating people.
According to Barnard, people cooperate to try to overtake their personal
limitations, whether they are physical, biological or mental. These theories are an
anticipation of what crowdsourcing actually is nowadays. Collaboration between
people helps them and the organization to which they belong to overtake
members’ limitations. If workers cannot solve a specific situation, addressing
outside the firm’s boundaries can be an excellent solution. In the following
chapter it will be analyzed the case of InnoCentive, a perfect example to
understand this situation. As it will be shown, important firms apply to
InnoCentive platform when their R&D departments are not able to find specific
solutions to their needs.
It results interesting to report Google executive chairman and former CEO
Eric Schmidt’s idea of collaboration, who stated that generally, with the word
“collaboration” people identify a group of people seated at a table talking and
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23. sharing ideas to reach together a common aim. Differently, he refers to another
concept: for Schmidt, collaboration means being able to use proficiency, creativity
and human intelligence with efficiency and effectiveness never seen so far.
(Tapscott, Williams 2008).
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25. Chapter 2
Examples of excellence in crowdsourcing
2.1 Threadless. Excellence in crowd-fashion
As already mentioned, crowdsourcing can be adopted in markets very
heterogeneous between them. One of the first success cases in this field is
Threadless.com, an e-commerce website but moreover an online community
around which artists gather together with people interested in fashion from all
over the world.
Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart, or better known as “The Jakes”, started
their little company in Chicago, in 2000. Threadless began as a hobby and it
evolved into a proper business activity after a few years.
Nickell and DeHart were two dropouts at the college, though their strong
passion for everything regarding the subculture and fashion drove them to start a
design competition, letting other designers instead of a common jury to pick the
winner. In this competition, anyone could design his or her own t-shirt and after
the judgment of the community members, the winner would have got a free t-
shirt with his or her design and the proper production would have start, so that
anyone could buy it.
After more than ten years, the way by which this website works is pretty
much the same and it is rather simple. Users still submit their artworks, which are
voted on for a week by other community members. Afterwards, any design
receives a score from zero to five and the design with the higher score will be print
in a proper t-shirt. Due to the success of the website, Threadless increased and
expanded its production toward other objects, such as bags, fashion accessories,
books and notebooks’ covers, water bottles and dishes.
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26. You are Threadless. You make the ideas, you pick what we
sell, you’re why we exist.5
The founders of this reality focus a lot in the artistic side of their project.
The diffusion of underground artistic forms of expression was indeed one of the
first reasons of the birth of Threadless. In their website, Nickell and DeHart remark
their will to support the artist community in every way possible, trying to help
unknown arts becoming worldwide known. This is the reason why every product
carries its artist’s name.
The growth of the company was very quick. Just in the two-year period
2004 - 2006, Threadless had an increase in sales of five million dollars, specifically
its income jumped from $1.5 million to $6.5 million and the website registered
one million users so far (Kalmikoff and Nickell 2010). The revenues were growing
500 percent every year, even though they have not employed any professional
designers, they have not enjoyed any retail distribution and especially they have
never advertised Threadless’ products. In this way, costs of the company are very
low and profit margins are around 30 percent. Moreover, since only the
production of the required designs started, the firm never produces a flop.
Thanks to its extraordinary quick growth, SkinnyCorp, the web agency
founded by Nickell and DeHart to whom Threadless belong, was named in 2008
“The most innovative small company in America” by the magazine Inc.
Eric Von Hippel, economist and professor at the MIT Sloan School of
Management who developed already in the 70s the concept of User Innovation,
said that Threadless is the perfect example of a new way of thinking about
innovation, because the idea for the products comes directly from the people who
use them, instead of coming out from an expensive and risky corporate research.
According to the founders, the secret behind the success of the company is
the working combination between an online art community and a highly
successful e-commerce business model.
5
Answer at the question “What is Threadless?” in http://support.threadless.com.
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27. Designers who submit their artworks to Threadless keep the legal property
of their designs until they are selected to be printed on a t-shirt or another object.
From that moment, SkinnyCorp registers the copyright of the artwork, specifying
the company as claimant and the designer as author. Furthermore, designers who
win the competitions receive at once $2.000 cash and $500 to be used in the
purchase of any SkinnyCorp product. In addition, they receive other $500 every
time their artwork is reprinted on clothing.
Hence, the motivation to participate in a Threadless contest can be either
for self-satisfaction, seeing a personal artwork on clothing and objects all over the
world, and for economic profit, since winners receive a fair amount of money for
their effort. Once the design is selected, the artist cannot use, or allow others to
use the design on any items, reproduce and sell it for other commercial purpose.
2.2 iStockPhoto. How stock photography has changed
In May 2000, Bruce Livingstone created iStockPhoto, a stock images
website in which it was possible to find galleries of photos and to download them
for free.
Livingstone originally wanted to join the traditional business of stock
photography, but he started having problems selling his images. He decided
therefore to upload all the images on a website for free, persuaded by the idea
that the old way of distributing images was about to stop working. Web designers
liked this project at once and they started downloading all the images they could.
The following year, iStockPhoto started charging a few amount of money
through a micropayment model, due to the fact that Livingstone was paying
$10.000 every month for the bandwidth to support the website traffic. The free
method started to be unbearable. He did not want to take advertising to cover the
cost of hosting, because he felt that it would violate the spirit of the company. It
was then possible to buy a high-definition digital picture for less than one dollar.
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28. People who uploaded their images on istockphoto.com, making them public and
available to be downloaded, got paid a royalty.
The basic idea of the website is to make available a range of high quality
ready-made images, suitable to be used for products, promotion, concept or
advertising.
The files contained in iStockPhoto are royalty-free. It means that users who
download them only have to pay once, even though they use the files multiple
times. The payment method works through a credit system. It means that users
who want to download an image or any other file from istockphoto.com need to
sign in and to buy an amount of credit, which price vary according to the kind of
purchase (95 cents or 24 cents in case of subscription). The credit cost of each file
depends on its size and its complexity, from a minimum of one to 200 credits.
Anyhow, this micropayment system is cheaper than any other traditional way of
purchasing images.
Besides the micropayment system, iStockPhoto take advantage of the non-
monetary exchange that grew up alongside the web as well. For instance, a
photographer, either professional and amateur, is interested on uploading his or
her images, because the more these are downloaded by other users, the more
credits they earn, so that they can download other images to use in their designs.
Furthermore, in this way photographers increase their chances to be recognized
inside the World Wide Web.
The terms of use of the material contained in iStockPhoto are not that
restrictive. Once a user downloads a file, he downloads its license, hence the
possibility to use it in different ways. Of course, there are some prohibited uses for
this license. It is not possible to use it in any logo or trademark, pornographic or
obscene works and to sub-license the files.
There are now nearly fifty thousand contributors to the website. And it is
possible to find not only images, but also video and audio files and logos.
IStockPhoto in a few years changed completely the way of stocking photographs,
making easier for users to find what they need and giving the possibility to
26

29. thousands of professional or amateur photographers to make their images public
and to receive a royalty from them.
The community has a primary role on the firm, so that Bruce Livingston
keeps underlining its importance and the fact that users are the decision-makers
of the company.
They don’t work for us. We work for them.6
Thanks to its big success, in 2006 iStockPhoto was bought by Getty Images
for $50 million. The ownership of one of the biggest company of stock photo
agency improved even more the quality of Livingstone’s project. Furthermore,
iStockPhoto could implement the control and the management of the researches,
making the website more reliable for its users.
The success of iStockPhoto is a clear signal of how the world of stock
photography changed and all these facts demonstrate the positive results of
making users active participants of an online activity. More in details, with his
platform Bruce Livingstone crowdsources to professional or amateur contributors
all the contents of the website, leaving all the other users free of downloading and
using files contained in istockphoto.com for a very little price.
Bruce’s brilliance is that he turned community into
commerce.7
In all the previous systems of stocking photos, it was very expensive both in
money and time to find images and besides the restrictions for using them were
quite strict.
6
Interview to Bruce Livingstone, founder and CEO of istockphoto.com.
Taken from Howe 2009: 191.
7
Jonathan Kein, founder and CEO of Getty Images, speaking about Bruce Livingstone’s company.
Taken from Howe 2009: 191.
27

30. 2.3 InnoCentive. Crowdsourcing in R&D
Crowdsourcing may be used with excellent results also in scientific field
and InnoCentive is an emblematic demonstration of it.
Innocentive.com is an online company born in 2001 as a start-up of Elly
Lilly and Company, an American pharmaceutical firm, while Alpheus Bingham and
Darren Carroll were trying to find a new way through which using the internet into
business. They hence had the idea of creating a platform where any business could
outsource their problems and the community could participate and try to solve
them. Basically, what they do is to connect firms with unknown and external
developers. It was immediately a successful idea and in a few years, InnoCentive
became a very reliable reality in crowdsourcing scientific matters.
InnoCentive is the open innovation and crowdsourcing
pioneer that enables to solve their key problems by
connecting them to diverse sources of innovation
including employees, customers, partners, and the world’s
largest problem solving marketplace.8
InnoCentive’s methodology consists in creating a network of problem
solvers to whom any company can ask to try to develop a new solution about
innovation and R&D.
The majority of firms that use InnoCentive (seekers, as called by the
website) are those that heavily rely on R&D as core value to overtake their
competitors. Of course, research is very expensive and through InnoCentive they
can discover new tactics and find new solutions to their problems. There are more
than 250.000 scientists from nearly 200 countries to whom a firm can apply. So
far, there have been more than 1.400 public challenges in innocentive.com and
over 30.000 solution submissions. Data about this reality are incredible, especially
8
Description of InnoCentive taken from: www.innocentive.com/about-innocentive/corporate-info
28

31. if we read about the companies that everyday apply to the online community:
Procter & Gamble, NASA, DuPont, BASF and Dow AgroSciences are only the most
famous names among the thousands of companies that relied on InnoCentive so
far.
Within the advantages that users can obtain by participating to a challenge,
InnoCentive itself underlines three basic reasons: to make a positive impact, to
exercise the brain and to promote oneself. Winning a challenge published on
innocentive.com guarantees attention and as a consequence promotion at the
winner. Many people who succeeded resolving brilliantly a challenge have been
hired from important companies or anyway they obtained job interviews with
several firms. Just reporting on the CV the success of an InnoCentive challenge
may give many opportunities in a job search. Furthermore, it is possible to win
money prizes from $10.000 to $1.000.000.
I’ve been interviewed by several magazines and
periodicals, including Forbes, Business Week, Business 2.0,
MIT Technology Review, The Wall Street Journal and The
Boston Globe. […] I’ve been mentioned in two books
describing crowdsourcing, including “We are smarter than
me” and “The open innovation marketplace”. […] It gives
me some cachet as a patent attorney, because it shows
that I have the requisite technical background to
understand my clients’ inventions. So, I have greatly
benefitted from being an InnoCentive problem solver,
much more than by the financial award I received.9
These just mentioned lines testify us how money is not a priority aspect for
people who participate in any crowdsourcing project. As it will be better explained
9
David Bradin, winner of an InnoCentive challenge. From: www.innocentive.com/why-solve2
29

32. in the following chapter of this thesis, motivations that guide them must be found
somewhere else.
Solvers that participate in the challenges are researchers, professors,
inventors, students or generally speaking, people who have passion in scientific or
business fields and want to find a solution to a problem. A very interesting fact
about this way of making research is that often people that win a challenge are
those that usually work in a different subject respect the one they participate for
(e.g. geologists resolving chemistry challenges). This aspect might be considered
an example to understand how sometimes is useful addressing to external solvers,
in order to bring new ideas and to foster innovation. In fact, trying to go outside
the boundaries of the company, looking for new people and technologies capable
to open the innovation toward new target, is the first target of a firm that decides
to crowdsource a part of its supply chain.
Giorgia Sgargetta is an Italian chemist, but moreover she is the perfect
example of how InnoCentive and generally crowdsourcing work. After a Ph.D. at
Perugia University and many years of experience in research laboratories of
different Italian firms, she now works for as quality manager in a firm near her
home. Since she misses a lot the laboratory work, she found the opportunity to
keep making research by participating in InnoCentive challenges, “to challenge
myself and for curiosity”10. In 2008 she won $30.000 by finding the solution to a
Procter&Gamble problem. Working in her kitchen, become a laboratory for the
occasion, she created a dishwasher detergent that could reveal when more soap
was needed.
10
From I’m a Solver – Giorgia Sgargetta, in InnoCentive Blog,
www.innocentive.com/blog/2009/11/20/i%E2%80%99m-a-solver-%E2%80%93-giorgia-sgargetta/
30

33. Chapter 3
Why people collaborate
3.1 Hard work, no money
The common belief makes us thinking that one of the priorities of doing
any kind of job is a gain in terms of money. Though, firms which crowdsource part
of their activity, they not always give a financial prize to who participate or find a
new solution. Therefore, there must be something else that motivates people to
participate in a crowdsourcing project.
As a proof of this, Jeff Howe, while analyzing the online community of
iStockPhoto, argues that people in such communities react with great hostility to
the idea that crowdsourcing is a means by which companies save their costs. He
says they do not feel exploited (Howe 2009). Nevertheless, Howe affirms that the
crowd is willing to dedicate its time and its capacity enthusiastically, but of course
not for free. It has to be a meaningful exchange. The meaning becomes the
currency by which people measure their contributions.
In order to understand the marginal role of money in crowdsourcing, it is
interesting to quote the funny sentence with which Howe concludes his book:
“And, oh yeah, maybe make a few bucks on the side”. The choice of writing this
sentence as the very last one in the first and most important book about
crowdsourcing is meaningful to understand how money is not so important for
people who decide to participate in this kind of projects. Of course, it often
happens that firms offer them a reward for the best contributions, but this is not
certainly the reason why people decide to collaborate.
From the point of view of organizations, they do need to motivate the
crowd, it is part of their interests. When firms are able to foster the participation,
they find themselves in a new situation, fulfilling their needs of talent and
innovation and moreover, with very low costs.
31

34. No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work
for someone else.11
The sentence just mentioned is enlightening in order to explain the
advantages that crowdsourcing can bring into organizations. In many fields, the
crowd will likely outperform the employees, sometimes even where proficiency of
experts is essential, as demonstrated by describing InnoCentive (§ 2.3).
Of course, there are risks as well linked with the decision of crowdsourcing
part of the supply chain. In particular, it happened that organizations have been
accused of using it as a mere means of exploitation, with the only purpose of
having innovation and new ideas without paying for them. This case will be better
analyzed in the following chapter.
3.2 The role of motivation
3.2.1 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Harold Maslow proposed the theory
called “Hierarchy of needs”, which provides an explanation of the needs that guide
human behaviors. According to Maslow, the hierarchy has a shape of a pyramid, in
which at the bottom it could be found the basic levels of needs. Once satisfied the
first need, it is possible to move upwards in the pyramid to satisfy the following
layers. The self-satisfaction of a person is reached throughout the various layers of
the pyramid.
The whole pyramid is sustained by physiological needs, such as breathing,
feeding, sleeping, sexual satisfaction and all the other basic needs necessary for
surviving. The second layer regards the safety needs, hence including health and
well-being, personal security, financial and employment security and the
11
Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems. Taken from Howe 2009: 11.
32

35. possibility of living in a safe area. If a person feels threatened, it is not possible for
him or her to reach the self-satisfaction. Further up, there are the social needs,
such as love and belongingness. Concepts like family, friendship and sense of
belonging to a social group are included in this level. Being in a social group, might
be professional, sportive, religious or any other smaller group, avoids people social
anxiety and loneliness. The following Maslow’s level regards esteem needs. These
can be categorized as external and internal motivators. The first ones are those of
reputation, recognition and generally the sense of esteem coming from the other
people, whereas the latter ones are part of the individual, such as self-esteem,
self-respect and accomplishment. The levels mentioned so far belong to the deficit
needs. According to Maslow, it means that if you are not able to satisfy them, you
have a deficit, you feel the need.
Finally, only once satisfied the deficit needs, it is possible to reach the top
of the pyramid, made by self-actualization needs, the development of a person’s
potential. This level regards each one’s desires and it is never fully satisfied,
because there are always new opportunities to continue to grow. Only a small
percentage of people reaches this last lever in the hierarchy pyramid.
Of course, Maslow developed his theory sixty years ago and there are
many criticisms about it. The theory makes sense from an intuitive point of view,
but many critics affirmed there is little evidence to support its functionality.
Others accused the American psychologist to have a very individualistic
perspective, since he analyzed only his country setting and therefore the theory
cannot be applied to other cultures. Maslow himself changed it and implemented
it in his following works. He added for instance the need for aesthetic and
knowledge before the self-satisfaction one.
Anyway, for the purpose of this thesis, this theory is very helpful to let us
better understand what motivates people to collaborate. Dropping the gaps this
Maslow’s theory has, we have to focus on the role of need contained in it.
According to Maslow, a need arises when an individual realizes the difference
between a real situation and a desired condition of things. Moreover, a need
33

36. satisfied is not motivating anymore and thus, from the opposite point of view, a
need is not motivating until the previous ones are satisfied.
These conditions help us to understand what motivates people to
participate in collaborative projects like crowdsourcing ones. If a person is not able
to reach the self-satisfaction level with his daily occupation, he or she very likely
will tend to find it somewhere else. For instance, it often happens that a person
does not work in the field he/she wanted or in the one he studied for. To satisfy
his deficit needs, there has to be found any other occupation that consents him to
survive. Thus, this person will seek the satisfaction by doing what he really likes.
Crowdsourcing may represent an opportunity to him and he will be well-disposed
to work in a project even though he will not get paid. The crucial point is that
people, when they are not able to fulfill their satisfaction needs inside the
boundaries of the workplace, they seek more meaningful work outside their daily
occupation.
In paragraph 2.3, while analyzing InnoCentive website, it was mentioned
the example of Giorgia Sgargetta. She represents an emblematic case about this
theory. As a matter of fact, she participated in the challenge after leaving the
laboratory job for working as quality manager near her home, so that she could
better dedicate to her family. Anyway, she was still willing to go back to her old
occupation, since she missed a lot the laboratory activity and she found in
InnoCentive the opportunity to do it. In this way, she has been able to satisfy her
deficit needs with her daily job and her self-satisfaction ones by participating in
InnoCentive challenges.
34

37. Chapter 4
Criticisms and risks of crowdsourcing
4.1 Criticisms of the crowdsourcing concept
Since the beginning of its use, there are a lot people who have seen in
crowdsourcing a means by which organizations can bring very low cost innovation
in their products or services.
In these terms, to crowdsource an activity is seen as exploitation, since
firms that use it address to the general public, either professionals or amateurs,
students or people working in completely different fields. InnoCentive, the case
explained in the second chapter, is an emblematic example of this theory. It is
seen merely as a shortcut to have creativity and innovation at a very low prize. As
a consequence, those whose primary activity is the one is crowdsourced, argue
that their professionalism fades into the background, leaving space to everyone to
participate in the creative contribution.
On the other hand, organizations that daily use crowdsourcing assert that it
is just a way to bring creativity, fresh ideas into the companies and to involve users
into everyday processes. In this way, the customer becomes a real co-worker, not
only somebody who buys a service or a product.
Being able to use this workforce, spontaneous and
qualified, is a great opportunity through which small and
medium enterprises may become competitive, also
comparing to the bigger ones.12
Speaking about exploitation becomes meaningless when we consider
crowdsourcing as a new business model, which gives to the firms the chance to
12
Interview with Gioacchino La Vecchia, CEO of CrowdEngineering, during the Milan Social Media
Week of 2010. Taken from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TolJr1eniYA
35

38. improve their production system. The expertise of professionals is not replaced. It
would simply work together with the “wisdom of the crowd”.
The change is very fast and clients’ requests are evolving in a completely
radical way. Hence, firms cannot restrict themselves to their internal proficiencies
and resources to satisfy external needs. What they need to do is to develop a
dynamic relationship with all their stakeholders, clients, competitors, partners and
public administration. (Tapscott, Williams 2008).
In 2004, the American journalist of “The New Yorker” James Surowiecki
published a book called “The wisdom of crowds”, in which he analyzes the power
of crowds in resolving problems of any nature. According to Surowiecki, the
collective thought of a group of people could be more helpful than the opinion of
an expert.
On the web, it is possible to find thousands of cases in which this concept is
demonstrated, from blogs to wikis, from forums to social networks, and maybe
the success of Wikipedia is the best one to understand it. Firms use this concept
through crowdsourcing their activities, in order to bring new creativity or to solve
problems their employees are not able to solve. Of course, this may cause several
doubts and discussions within professionals and experts.
In the summer 2011, The Italian Minister of Labour and Social Politics,
through its agency “Italia Lavoro”, published on Zooppa.it, a social advertising
platform that will be analyzed later, a contest for the creation of a spot video, a
commercial art and a graphic art, in order to promote the system “Buono
Lavoro”.13 To whom that would have won the contest, “Italia Lavoro” raffled off
22,000 ZOOP$, shared within the three sub-contests.14
Despite the quite high amount of money, this competition has generated a
big debate within the professionals of communication. Many of them asserted
that the contest of a public authority would have reduced the value of the creative
artists. Ilenia Boschin, community manager of Zooppa Europe, tried to solve the
generated polemic by explaining that it is not possible to lead the discussion to a
13
Complete brief of the contest: http://zooppa.it/contests/buono-lavoro/brief
14
For the explanation of Zooppa economic system see §8.2.
36

39. choice between not considering the professionalism of experts and exploiting the
creativity of the crowd not paying them or paying very little. Zooppa is an
advertising platform itself, it means that the Minister of Labour or any other firm
that publishes a contest in the website has already programmed his advertising
strategy, through the opinion of experts. Publishing a contest is already an
advertising campaign itself. Furthermore, the communities who participate in
Zooppa contests are very often made by professionals.15
Other criticisms about the concept of crowdsourcing regard the way
sources are checked and how reliable the contents coming from the crowd can be.
About this debating point, it is very interesting to quote the opinion of Frieda
Brioschi, founder of Wikimedia Italia.
To control the reliability of the contents, you just need to
let the crowd doing it. And this is the way Wikipedia
works. Everyone can write but everyone can also check
the articles. Clearly, people have different interests. Not
everyone writes and not everyone check. […] Having a
potentially countless number of writers and editors allows
us to obtain many information and to have them
constantly checked and adjusted. Therefore, in the long
term Wikipedia becomes a reliable product. […] The crowd
rewards you, but only if you play with its rules.16
This quote introduces the risks and the drawbacks that can be found in
crowdsourcing an activity. Of course, what the crowd creates should be constantly
checked, but on the other hand, it is very important to let the crowd leading the
creation of contents. The role of the firm that decides to crowdsource an activity is
15
For the whole debate and Zooppa’s answer see http://responsa.it/questions/crowsourcing-e-
lecito-dare-a-tutti-lopportunita-di-essere-creativi-o-si-tratta-di-un-modello-che-sminuisce-la-
professionalita-degli-addetti-ai-lavori
16
Interview with Frieda Brioschi, founder of Wikimedia Italia, during the Milan Social Media Week
of 2010. Taken from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVn2fn4-dSQ
37

40. to stay behind the scenes and to provide only the guidelines the crowd needs to
follow.
Another crucial problem might be given by times and deadlines. Leaving
the crowd leading the creation of contents sometimes means not having the
correct perception of what is happening and of when the final results will be
available. Thus, it is important to fix deadlines for submitting the contributions,
even though this can lead to the loss of precious contributions or collaborators. In
addition, the quality of results is not always guaranteed. Often, it happened that
many projects did not reach the waited success or anyway the results were not
the ones useful to the final activity.
Nicholas Carr, the American writer who published in “The Atlantic”
magazine the provocative article “Is Google making us stupid?”, was the first one
who talked about a “cult of the amateur”. In 2005, he wrote on his blog,
roughtype.com, an essay titled “The amorality of Web 2.0”. Through this text, Carr
explains his criticism against the limitation of the blogosphere, accusing it to be
superficial and affirming that “the promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur
and distrust the professional”17.
In his book “The cult of the amateur” of 2007, Andrew Keen reopens Carr’s
arguments, moving a strong criticism toward the celebration of collaboration
through the web. He argues that we are diving headlong into an age of mass
mediocrity, in which the crowd replaces experts. He continues his analysis arguing
that the digital revolution is destroying our culture and our economy, leading
toward an age of “mobocracy” (Keen 2007). Of course Keen is really skeptical
about all the positive contributions that can be found by addressing to a multitude
of people. It is interesting to see how Jeff Howe, in his book “Crowdsourcing. How
the power of the crowd is driving the future of business”, deals with Keen’s
analysis, considering it a nice critical point of view but providing in the same time
his answer in favor once again of his ideas.
17
www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php
38

41. I share Keen’s concern, if not his general condemnation of
social media. Google, YouTube and Digg all constitute a
form of mob rule, and as their importance increases, so
does the mob’s influence. But there’s a fine line between
mobocracy and democracy, and some tolerance of the
former is generally required to achieve the latter.
Crowdsourcing […] corrects a long-standing inequity. The
culture industry has long been controlled by a select few,
and as any tour of prime-time network television reveals,
they haven’t had too much trouble finding the lowest
common denominator all on their own. If anything, a dose
of democracy could be just the tonic the culture industry
needs.18
Instead of talking about “mobocracy”, Howe prefers referring to
crowdsourcing as a way by which moving toward a perfect meritocracy. On July 5th
1993, around the time Internet was first making its way into mainstream culture,
Peter Steiner published in The New Yorker a cartoon featuring a dog sitting in front
of a computer saying “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”19. The cartoon
became rather popular and it can well describe the situation of people
participating in collaborative projects and how crowdsourcing leads to a perfect
meritocracy. With it, nobody knows whether people participating are
professionals or not. Works are evaluated just for what they are.
18
Howe 2009: 246.
19
www.condenaststore.com/-sp/On-the-Internet-nobody-knows-you-re-a-dog-New-Yorker-
Cartoon-Prints_i8562841_.htm
39

42. 4.2 The debate about intellectual property
Together with the criticisms just above mentioned, crowdsourcing raised as
well problems dealing with the property of the contents. It is difficult to assign the
ownership of a collective work to a single person. There is a big debate around the
intellectual property of the contents on the web.
Andrew Keen upholds again that the web 2.0 and all the cooperative
projects are seriously compromising the intellectual property. He states that it
results impossible to determine to whom the collaborative works belong. And so it
is for the reliability of contents. At this purpose, Keen shows the example of blogs.
It is not possible to know whether the contributes come actually from people,
from the crowd or if they are the work of paid spin doctors or even of the author
himself. (Keen 2007).
It is interesting to quote Frieda Brioschi’s answer, founder and president of
Wikimedia Italia, when she was asked to whom it belongs what is created by the
crowd. She used the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle, imagining a group of people
completing it together. It is impossible to say who has the ownership of the final
work. The value of intellectual property in cooperative works is meaningless. What
is important is the value of content.20
Already in 2005, the novelist William Gibson publishes in Wired magazine
“God’s Little Toys. Confessions of a cut & paste artist”, an article which tried to
solve these arguments. He wrote that it does not make sense anymore to discuss
about the property of contents, basically because people care about participation
more than they do about the ownership of their creative works.
Our culture no longer bothers to use words like
appropriation or borrowing to describe those very
activities. Today’s audience isn’t listening at all – it’s
participating. Indeed, audience is as antique as term as
20
Taken from: http://crowdsourcing.toweb.co/la-proprieta-intellettuale-nel-crowdsourcing/
40

43. record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically
physical. The record, not the remix is the anomaly today.
The remix is the very nature of digital. […] The
recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has
become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two
centuries.21
Keen quotes the same paragraph, but of course with a completely different
attitude, complaining about how the “Cut & paste culture” is destroying the whole
creative world. It is very interesting how Gibson closed his article, by affirming that
we are living in a particular moment, where the record (an object) and the
recombinant (a process) still coexist. Nevertheless, it seems to him to be clear the
direction toward which things are going.
It is true that who participates in crowdsourcing, or generally speaking
collaborative projects, does not claim the ownership of his or her work. As we
have seen in the chapter dedicated to the role of motivation, the primary aim of
the crowd is to take part in a cooperative project and to feel member of a
community.
In any case - and this theory will be confirmed in the second part of the
thesis, when single cases will be analyzed - most of the times, when a contribute
reaches good results, organizations recognize the ownership of the idea and an
economical reward is usually granted.
21
Gibson 2005. Also available at www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson.html
41

45. PART TWO
This thesis has analyzed so far some excellent cases regarding the
application of crowdsourcing in different fields such as scientific R&D,
photography and fashion, achieving excellent results. In the web then, it is
possible to find other thousands of notable examples and every week new
websites dedicated to this subject rise.
The analysis now moves over, focusing on the core of this work: how media
considered traditional ones crowdsource their activities or part of them.
In the digital age, traditional media enterprises need to reorganize
themselves. For this purpose, crowdsourcing may represent a means by which
media can use a new approach in order to involve their users in the change of
setting we are experiencing due to the web.
We try to understand whether this concept can be applied to media
industries like television, radio, journalism and cinema, fields where the feedback
of users and their contributions have always been a key resource to reach quality
results.
The analysis proceeds through dedicating a chapter to each traditional
medium and describing every time cases of excellence in their fields, in order to
understand better the situation. At the end of each chapter, there is a paragraph
reporting some considerations.
43

47. Chapter 5
Crowdsourcing in the television industry
5.1 Current TV
Current TV is an independent television network founded in 2005 by the
former American Vice President Al Gore and the politician Joel Hyatt. They had the
idea of creating a new channel after been continuously disappointed by the
existing ones. Their aim was to launch a viewer-generated television that could
broadcast people voices, away from any political orientation.
Unlike most other cable networks on the dials, we are not
owned by one of the large media conglomerates. We are
independent and that means we have the freedom to air
programming that shines a light where others won’t dare
and boldly explores important subjects through intelligent
commentary.22
Since its beginning, Current TV has always tried to bring the intelligent
internet into the television. What distinguishes Current from the other
crowdsourcing TV platforms is the high quality of its contents. The videos are in
most cases finely made from a technical point of view. This is due to the fact that
often collaborators who decide to participate in Current projects are video makers
indeed. The quality of contents is witnessed also by the Emmy Award received in
2007 as “Best Interactive Television Service”.
Current has a well-defined target, the young-adults between eighteen and
thirty-five year-old. The audience is therefore used to simultaneously use different
technologies and moreover is a well-educated audience. This fact gave a good
contribution to the development and success of the channel.
22
Taken from: http://current.com/s/faq.htm#top
45

48. Outside the United States, Current TV was available in the United Kingdom
and in Ireland, where it closed in March 2011, in Italy and it is currently available
in Canada and South Africa.
Even though in Italy Current finished its broadcasting on July 31st 2011, it
represented an utterly new television experience in the country.
When Current arrives in Italy in 2008 [May 8th], the
country finds itself in front of a completely different
market situation, comparing to the one the channel found
itself in more developed media markets such as in US and
UK. Therefore, offering to a target defined as young-
adults (18-35) independent information and in-depth
documentary offer, was something utterly new and the
idea was followed by other media in the following two
years. We’ve found somehow favorable circumstances.
Our mission was a very high and difficult one, which was
proposing to an audience usually not interested in in-
depth news and cultural-political journalism, exactly that
kind of offer, wrapped up, communicated and somehow
reported in a new way. A way that no one had
experienced yet, either in Italy or in other countries.23
In Current TV website, the word “crowdsourcing” is never mentioned. They
prefer referring to Current always as Viewer Created Content platform, in order to
underline the role of the viewers-collaboborators. Across the years, Current
became a real cross-media platform, perfectly integrating internet and television
and other media. An example of this is given during the inauguration of Barack
23
Taken from the interview with Paolo Lorenzon, marketing director of Current Italia, made by
th
“Wikiclasse” on November 24 2010, during the course “Methods and Techniques of
Communication” of Edoardo Fleischner.
The whole interview is available on “Ariel 2.0” (http://ariel.unimi.it) for students and teachers of
University of Milan.
46

49. Obama as President in January 2009, broadcasting the event simultaneously on
television, web streaming, web radio and liveblogging on Twitter.
In the United States, Current is a rather big reality, counting on around four
hundred employees. The channels does not deal only with user generated content
or crowdsourcing. Many of its services, as for instance the investigative journalism
program Vanguard, are realized by professional reporters, from different
countries.
The collaborative model of Current improved across the years, in fact now
it does not speak anymore of Viewer Created, but of local reportage. Among the
collaborators, many of them are professional filmmakers, communication
students, freelance journalists who effectively live the stories they tell in their
territory, but they cannot find any room in mainstream media to present them.
Current is anyway first of all a television channel, offering a television
schedule. The distinguishing aspect from other TVs or web TVs can be found in the
fact that often Current draws its contents from censured and unedited material.
Filmmakers participating in the project know the topics wherein Current is
working, through a shared agenda, and they find in the channel the platform
where they can share their experiences.
Despite presenting itself as a bottom-up television, only the thirty percent
of what is broadcasted is actually made by viewers. As a consequence, Current is
not a fully channel with contents realized by users, but anyhow it results a very
interesting reality to understand how the crowd contributed to its success. Since
2009, the way of creating contents has evolved and many videos are substituted
by authentic documentaries, acquiring also unedited material.
Current integrates its crowdsourcing model by giving the possibility to
users to create commercial ads themselves. With the VCAM (Viewer Created Ad
Message) projects, the crowd can indeed create and submit commercials24. The
best submissions will be acquired and broadcasted, giving, beyond a financial
earning of thousands of dollars, also a great visibility to the winners, since the
24
http://current.com/participate/vcam/
47

50. name, nickname and picture of them are always inserted at the end of the spot.
Together with its commercial brands, Current relies on the fact that the
participative advertising model is nowadays the best one. To testify the success of
this way of advertising, brands like Warner Bros, Canon, Mini and Samsung are
among the ones that participated in VCAM project.
5.2 C6.tv. Glocal information in Italy
C6.tv is an Italian web television channel that deals with local video
journalism. For now, it is only available for the cities of Milan and Rome, but the
goal is of course of spreading all over Italy, with newsrooms in all the most
important cities.
The objective of the project is to report the realities of Milan and Rome
through the direct eyes of their citizens. As indicated in the website:
C6.tv is made by people for people themselves.25
The editorial staff, made up of professional journalists, manages a team of
video reporters. The most interesting aspect of the project though, is the fact that
the newsroom crowdsources part of the phase of collecting news, by allowing
anyone who has shot a video to submit it to the website, either broadcasting it live
or uploading it on the website. Who decides to participate in the project by
submitting videos, does not receive any income, unless the video is sold to
another network. In this case, the author receives the sixty percent of the total
amount.
Contents of C6.tv can regard any form of information, from culture to
politics, from fashion to sport, from music to technology. In any case, everything
has always a local connotation.
25
http://c6.tv/chi-siamo
48

51. The eighty percent of the videos present in the website is made by
professionals. Therefore, only a part of the contents is crowdsourced. However,
amateur journalists or video reporters have the possibility of becoming
correspondents of their own geographical areas, or collaborators for a specific
field.
During the course “Methods and Techniques of Communication” of
professor Fleischner, the “Wikiclasse” had an interview with Marco Di Gregorio,
founder and director of C6.tv26. In the interview, Di Gregorio was asked whether
the citizen journalism model, with anyone allowed of making information, could
belittle the profession of journalism. He stated that the participation just makes
the journalism different. The profession itself has changes. Journalists do not seek
anymore news directly themselves. For economical reasons, they wait press
agencies to send them pieces of news. As several time underlined in this thesis, in
the time we are currently living, anyone with a cellphone or a cheap camera is
potentially able of becoming a reporter. However, the reliability of sources and
the authenticity of information are still fundamental. This is where the figure and
the proficiency of professional journalists have a central role.
The duty of newsrooms might somehow leave the traditional tasks of
writing articles or shooting news services. However, they need to control the
contents, of course not in order to censure them, but to check their reliability. It is
very important to understand where the video comes from, who shot it. During
the interview above cited, Marco Di Gregorio underlined this aspect, quoting the
example of a political demonstration. If they publish a video submitted by a
participant of the protest, they do clarify the author, so that viewers can
understand without being afraid or having doubts about the newsroom’s political
ideas.
C6.tv, through its model of business, is a successful demonstration of how
the way of making journalism has changed and how it is currently evolving toward
an always more collaborative one. Their idea is that having a higher amount of
26 th
The interview took place on November 24 2010 and it is available on “Ariel 2.0”
(http://ariel.unimi.it) for students and teachers of University of Milan.
49

52. users, they would logically have a higher level of pluralism of information. The
collaborative journalism can be the solution to the dictatorship of information.
Consequently, C6.tv aims at enlarging its number of collaborators, covering
more cities in Italy and finally trying to overtake the boundaries of the web to
broadcast in television as well.
5.3 Utopía TV. Spanish journalists gathering around a new platform
Utopía TV is a Spanish web television channel born in November 2011 from
an idea of the journalist Enrique Meneses, together with his colleagues Kike
Álvarez, Pepa Gonzáles, Lola García-Ajofrín and Rosa Jiménez Cano. Their project
was born after being disappointed by the Spanish networks situation, where they
could not find space anymore to express their ideas freely.
A TV which is an adventure. A team looking for ideas and
solutions. Join us and participate.27
Those who participate in Utopía TV are mainly Spanish journalists tired of
the existing press situation. The whole idea rose during the 15M Movement and
the Indignados one, as part of a series of demonstration in 2011 and 2012 in
Spain. Since the political and economical situation is rather difficult nowadays in
the country, people try to find ways to change it peacefully. Utopía TV is exactly
one the results of these protest movements.
Enrique Meneses and his colleagues decided hence to create a television
channel, because this is the most followed medium in Spain and moreover it is the
most accessible one to everybody.
27
Description of the project in its Facebook page. Taken from:
www.facebook.com/pages/utopianowtv/284651844892737?sk=info
50

53. Decided to demonstrate what I’m saying, I suggested
myself to seek a crazy idea and, as defender and lover of
adventure, I decided to create a television channel.
[…] Everybody thinks there is need of a million Euros to do
it and the first solution that always comes to mind is to
apply for a bank loan. I chose another solution, a way of
thinking more “reasonable”.28
As stated by the founder Meneses, Utopía TV wants to be a television
different from those already existing in Spain, with the will of being close to
people protesting against the Spanish situation, broadcasting national and
international informative news and cultural programs. Furthermore, one of the
aims that guide the whole project is to show people how it would be possible to
create a TV channel without much money.29 The voluntary collaborators were paid
with a currency created for the occasion, the “Pichulin”. The name comes from the
word with which Spanish soldiers used to call the foreign currency during the war
in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. One “Pichulin” corresponds to one Euro and
the idea is to change them one day, when the project will achieve a bigger
audience and consequently higher benefits. Meneses decided not to receive any
income from advertising, in order to be as free and independent as possible.
Already since the early beginning of the project, Utopía TV could count on
almost fifty collaborators between journalists and computer technicians. The
majority of participants were professionals, but of course, anyone may find space
in Utopía TV to tell his own opinion and to become himself a voluntary journalist.
The only prerequisite was to truly believe in the cause. In an interview with
apmadrid.es, the website of the press association of Madrid, Meneses affirmed
that since the beginning, there were about four hundred requests of collaboration,
28
Taken from: www.enriquemeneses.com/2011/10/15/lo-primero-%C2%BFideas-o-dinero-utopia-
tv/
29
Source: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMWpghF-
zkI&feature=bf_prev&list=UUyTY7SB_1H5SKwuKX0leopA
51

54. from journalists from Morocco, Egypt, Persian Gulf, Palestine and other countries
with difficult political situations.30
This may be considered a demonstration to understand that people were
motivated to participate in Utopía TV because of the will to change and to actually
do something in order to modify a situation they could not bear anymore.
Everything in the project was rather easy, without requiring any specific
proficiency or the use of professional instrument. They simply opened a YouTube
channel wherein they posted all the videos and the interviews.31
The purpose of Enrique Meneses and his team was to enlarge the project,
becoming a sort of crossmedia platform, adding to the television channel also a
web radio and informative magazines, everything with the form of voluntary
collaboration.
However, since the end of the year 2011, it is not possible to find any new
contribute, either in the website or in the YouTube channel. They did not publish
any official piece of news declaring the end of the project. In a post published in
his own blog, dated 24th December 2011, Enrique Meneses wrote that after the
new Spanish government from November 2011, the bureaucracy difficulties
increased and it resulted very difficult to sustain a voluntary project like Utopía
TV.32 According to what he wrote, it would seem that, at least for now, the whole
project has been interrupted.
Nevertheless, Utopía TV has been a demonstration of how crowdsourcing
and collaboration may result useful also in circumstances where people cannot
find their information space or when they attempt to change a situation.
30
Source: http://www.apmadrid.es/noticias/generales/utopia-tv-como-crear-una-television-con-
200-euros-y-sin-belen-esteban
31
www.youtube.com/utopiatvnow
32
Source: www.enriquemeneses.com/2011/12/24/la-burocracia-y-las-trabas-enemigas-de-la-
iniciativa
52

55. 5.4 YouReporter. Citizen journalism in Italy
YouReporter.it is an Italian good working project of citizen journalism. It is
a bit different from a mere concept of crowdsourcing, since there is not a proper
firm that outsources a part of its supply chain to the crowd. It might be considered
more as a user generated platform. Anyway, it still is an excellent example of how
participation and crowd contents are used with success in television and more in
detail in television journalism. Users are allowed to upload into the website videos
recorded with any kind of camera, either professional ones or, more frequently,
compacts ones and cellphones.
The primary aim of YouReporter is to gather many pieces of news from all
over the country and from different points of view, throughout the contributions
of anyone.
Together with you, we aim to enrich the world of
communication. We want to give a face and voice also to
those small pieces of news which do not become national
cases, maybe only for the distance or distraction of
professional journalism troupes.33
Of course, the quality of the images is generally quite low, but the success
of YouReporter is due to its ability of being always among the first news agencies
showing a fact. Moreover, it allows national and local newscasts to use and
broadcast videos uploaded in the website, with the unique condition of
mentioning YouReporter.it website and of displaying the logo. The same rule is
available to be applied also to any other website. One of the strengths of
YouReporter is in fact the possibility that it gives to other websites and especially
to national newscasts to broadcast its videos. Because of this, YouReporter
receives a huge visibility and therefore always more amateur video reporters
33
Taken from “Company Overview” in http://www.facebook.com/YouReporter.it/info
53

56. upload their video in this platform. Furthermore, they have recently released a
mobile application. However, for now it is available only for iPhone and iPad.
Through the app, contributions of users are even simpler, since they can upload
their news videos directly from the mobile device and consequently the idea of
immediacy of YouReporter becomes even more concrete.
The success of the project is witnessed by the media channels that have
broadcasted YouReporter videos so far. Between them, the most important Italian
newscasts, such as TG5 and TG1 and also international ones, from the British BBC
to the American CNN and NBC, until the Arabian Al Jazeera.
As we have seen, YouReporter is a reality constantly improving, thanks also
in this situation to the increase of availability of camera-provided devices, so that
more users who witness and record a fact can easily upload their contributions.
This is a good example of how crowdsourcing can be used in a very useful way in
information too. Here, users are definitely not replacing professional news
reporters’ work, but they only add more pieces of news providing them from a
different point of view. Professional journalism will not be threatened by this form
of reporting, since the quality of work is very different. While one is focused on
reliability of information, good quality services and control of sources, the
amateur journalism of YouReporter results useful and important for its immediacy
and its proficiency of reaching a massive amount of information, even in hidden
part of the country.
5.5 Considerations about crowdsourcing in the television industry
Television is probably the medium where the evolution brought by web 2.0
is felt most. Since its debut in 2005, YouTube utterly changed the way of watching
videos, arriving to producing itself TV series available only on YouTube. Of course,
the Google’s video-sharing website refers more to UGC (User-generated contents)
rather than to crowdsourcing, the crowd is not asked to participate in a specific
54

57. project. Nevertheless, its popularity and its dimensions are helpful to understand
how much people want to create themselves videos and to be part of the change.
John Seabrook published an article in Wired Italia magazine, in the number of May
2012, where he forecasts a future where the television as traditionally known will
be entirely substituted by YouTube (Seabrook 2012: 66-71). In the article, it is
reported an interview with Robert Kyncl, vice-president of Google’s department
“TV and entertainment”, who states that the television is always more dealing
with niche markets, allowing advertising to reach a specific audience. The web is
the best medium able to satisfy these niches. Users create themselves what they
will watch afterwards, without much attention to the quality of images. In
addition, contents cost almost nothing in terms of production and anyone can
submit his or her contributions.
Speaking more specifically about crowdsourcing, all the cases analyzed in
the previous paragraphs (Current TV, C6.tv, Utopía TV and YouReporter)
demonstrate how these kinds of projects could work on television. This is still the
most followed medium, the one where prizes for advertising spaces are highest.
The big potential of the medium though, brings also to big threats and risks. Many
projects are short-lived, ending after a few months. Utopía TV for instance,
seemed to be a brilliant idea, and it apparently had a fairly high amount of
followers since its beginning. However, the last video uploaded on the YouTube’s
channels is dated December 2011. Therefore, as better explained in paragraph 5.3,
the project lasted only a short time.
Regarding traditional television channels, the situation is more elaborated.
Usually, the television industry is a very concentrated one, where professionals
still have a central role in the creation of contents. Since times are very narrow,
users’ participation is less direct, at least concerning the actual creation of
programs. Between 2005 and 2009, it was broadcasted in Italy the channel Qoob
TV, launched by MTV Italy, where all the contents, both music videoclips and
programs, were made by users through collaboration. This channel obtain a
satisfying success, especially within the Italian underground music scene, thanks to
55

58. its schedule, which gave space to niche realities broadcasting independent short-
movies and videoclips of unknown musicians. However, also this project ended
because of bureaucratic and legal difficulties.
Although we have seen how sometimes it can be complex for users to
participate in the creation of contents, they are involved in traditional television
channels in another way. The large majority of successful programs take
advantage of the crowd, throughout asking them to rank participants in the
shows, especially in talent ones. As stated also by Jeff Howe, people have the
opportunity to vote on the protagonists of the shows they like, and the act of
putting such decision on a vote is a form of crowdsourcing (Howe 2009).
56

59. Chapter 6
Crowdsourcing in the movie industry
6.1 Life In A Day. The story of a single day on Earth
On June 6th 2010, an advertisement appeared on YouTube, announcing the
project of a collective movie. It was about Life In A Day, the first social movie ever.
The original idea came from Kevin Macdonald, British director who won the
Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1999. He initially wanted to seek
a way to elevate the amateur YouTube videos into an art form. YouTube viewers
were therefore asked to film their whole day on the following July 24th and to
submit their videos within the end of the month.
What I want to do is to make a film, unlike any film, I
think, that’s ever been made before, which is to ask
thousands of people, everywhere in the world, on a single
day, to film some aspect of their day and to post that
material onto YouTube.
[…] It’ll be kind of like a time capsule, which people in the
future could look at that and say “Oh my god, that’s what
it was like”. A portrait of the world in a day.34
Macdonald’s aim was hence to provide a snapshot of a single day of the life
on Earth lived by any person in the world. It was given absolute freedom to the
participant in the shooting. They were only asked to answer three questions: what
they fear the most, what they love and what they had in their pocket in that
precise moment. Above that, they needed to film an ordinary day of them, what
they normally do in their life.
34
Kevin Macdonald speaking about Life In A Day. Taken from:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_4uii96xqM
57

60. More than 80,000 people from 192 different countries of the world
answered the claim and submitted over 4,500 hours of footage35. For the final
edition, they were selected videos of 334 people. Between them, there were
professional filmmakers and directors but also amateurs of the video camera. The
result that came out from all this material is a ninety-five minutes documentary
film.
The movie was produced by Ridley Scott and his movie production
company Scott Free, together with YouTube. After a huge editing work of four
months36 by Macdonald and the editor Joe Walker, the film received a great
success at its premiere at Sundance Film Festival in 2011.
Macdonald and Walker used a sort of restricted crowdsourcing also in the
editing phase of the movie. They asked indeed film students, filmmakers and
documentary makers with languages proficiency, since videos came from all over
the world, to watch the clips, to rate and to tag them, in order to make the final
edition easier. The selection stage was the longest one and certainly it was
impossible for the director and the editor to do it only by themselves. On October
31th 2011, it has been released the DVD version of the movie and furthermore it
has been made available to watch for free on YouTube, with subtitles in twenty-
seven languages.37
The general judgment from the critics was positive and it achieved also a
massive success in terms of views. The YouTube channel has registered over 35
million views and more than 150,000 subscriptions so far38. Of course though, the
most interesting think about Life In A Day is the fact of being the first experiment
of social movie. Moreover, the idea came from professional people working in the
movie industry.
It is important to underline how the availability of technologies allowed a
massive number of people to participate in the project. The possibility of owning
good quality equipment at an affordable prize leads many amateurs toward the
35
Source: www.sundance.org/festival/blog-entry/life-in-a-day-indie-film-around-the-globe/
36
Source: www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/jun/15/kevin-macdonald-live-q-and-a
37
www.youtube.com/lifeinaday
38
Spring 2012.
58

61. development of their passion and consequently to produce good quality videos or,
less often, proper movies. Once again, the access at new technologies and
consequently at new practices like crowdsourcing, may be seen as a form or
meritocracy. As a matter of fact, the film industry is a rather close one, where new
talents find difficulties to fit in, especially because of the high production costs.
Life In A Day may demonstrate at this purpose how anyone could
participate in a movie and, seen the big number of people that effectively sent
their contributions, how people want to be part of a social project.
Kevin Macdonald registered the format of the movie and other projects are
in the production stage. Britain In A Day is the forthcoming one and it is produced
by Scott Free and BBC, with the participation of YouTube39. The final result was
broadcasted in the national channel BBC2, on June 11th 2012, in occasion of the
Olympic Games in London, as part of the BBC’s Cultural Olympiad. This time,
Macdonald is the producer, together once again with Ridley Scott, and the role of
director is held by Morgan Matthews, an English documentaries director.
The aim is to provide a glimpse of contemporary British life and, as well as
in Life In A Day, people were asked to shoot their daily life during the whole day
on November 12th 2011 and to upload the footage onto the YouTube channel by
the following November 21st. They could use any kind of camera they wanted and
they could shoot anything they wished. The unique condition was to say, in a part
of the filming, what they see looking out of their window, what makes them
happy, what they like or dislike about the UK, which are their vices and finally to
describe the most important thing in their life. It was possible to participate also
for foreign people, they only needed to shoot everything inside the UK.
We can create this wonderful patchwork of our nation
that reflects everything and anything about us and what it
39
www.youtube.com/britaininaday
59