Crowdsourcing is a fascinating concept. Wikipedia killed Britannica within a span of few years. Wikipedia heavily diluted the quality of content by crowdsourcing it. However, the quantity of the hosted content was exponentially more than Britannica. The information age has changed business models through easy collaboration and open access.
The thing that needs to be noted here is that Wikipedia has a large team of editors that filter all the content that is published. Without the filter mechanism, the whole concept would fall apart. To further elaborate on this idea, I would also like to talk about airbnb.com. Airbnb or Air Bed and Breakfast is a very successful hotel disrupter in the making. The crowd sourced platform allows people to put up their couch, bed, room, house or village for rent. One must note that was already happening through websites like Craigslist. What was missing was the element of trust. Airbnb offers a rigid verification process and offers a million dollar insurance to its renters.
What we saw was that Craigslist disrupted newspaper classified, and within a few years we have new entrants in the market who are disrupting Craigslist based on its weaknesses. We all love the crowd but it cannot be trusted as is.
From daily deals to someone fixing your toilet, we see that crowdsourcing has started to dominate the market. The question I would like to raise today is how far crowdsourcing will further disrupt existing businesses.
