Microtasking in the Age of the Crowd

It can be said that a crowd has people in it from all walks of life, and for most of those people in today's technological jungle, crowdsourcing is a way of life. Crowdsourcing is defined as obtaining labor and products, and also intellectual content, from people outside of a company. Usually, work is broken down into piecework and shopped out, sometimes at ridiculously low prices, but in the age of the crowd, a worker can pick or choose what to work on, at the price range they like. This has redefined the concept of "hourly wage" in that HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) are now the new tasks, paid for in new ways, through new technological payment systems. Crowdsourced, microtasks like this are tasked to solvers (workers mostly online), and reimbursed via online payment systems such as PayPal. It's a new form of work with a bright future and it's one which paid search marketing is targeting. By targeting your product to a specific demographic or people typing in specific keywords to a search engine.

In 2005, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that 57% of online teens (roughly 12 million at that time) created something on the web. These teen content creators, in just a few short years, have now created content-sourced jobs particularly in the areas of Research and Development that are growing by leaps and bounds. More updated information on technology and media use (as of 2009) can be found at http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/c/4/topics.asp, which is the Pew portal. Per their December 2008 survey 74% of American adults now use the internet. The trending seems to indicate that more and more work could be done on the web, crowdsourced, given the number of "eyeballs" now focusing on content and content development.

Information for internet usage in the UK can be found at the OxIS (Oxford Internet Surveys Site) at http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/microsites/oxis/ which focuses on "focuses on the use of web 2.0 and mobile applications, digital literacy and the quality of people's ICT experiences" or alternativly PPC software can do the same job. They report that "The percentage of users has increased between 2005 and 2007 across all income groups. Those in the highest income category are more than twice as likely to use the Internet (91%) than those in the lowest income category (39%). Differences between income groups have remained more or less constant since 2005", with students three times more likely (97%) to use the internet than retirees (31%). In fact, they state "The largest increase in use has been amongst those who are employed, from about 68% in 2003 and 2005 to 81% in 2007" which directly ties into the idea that content-sourced jobs and HITs are the wave of the future in terms of areas of new work.