Chapter Two: The Rise of the Amateur

What better place to start than at the beginning? As my regular readers know, my publisher, Crown, and I have decided to publish reader comments on some selected material from my upcoming Crowdsourcing Book. Here's a snippet from last week's post with additional details:

My publisher—Crown Books—has given me the official green light to excerpt some choice selections from my book for your critical review. The most salient, witty or astute remarks will be published as an appendix in the final chapter of the book. I was inspired, in part, by what Clive Thompson did in his Wiredmag piece on Radical Transparency last April. He blogged the article before it was published, and ran the best comments he received in the margins. I was pretty impressed—but hardly surprised—by the thoughtfulness of the comments. The resulting piece created more of a dialogue than the monologue in which magazine writers generally traffic. The mechanics of storytelling, and the exigencies of print publishing, require that we smooth the corners—reduce complexities and nuances. What Clive did, and what I hope to do as well, is bring those sharp corners, the paradoxes and contradictions and exceptions, back into the final product.

In other words, I'm soliciting constructive criticism. For the most part, I'll be excerpting the more analytical, expository bits. The places in which I make arguments to which some, perhaps many, will take exception. At least I hope that's the case. Today's a bit more of a lark: A story.

But first some background. Chapter 1, an Introduction, essentially takes the reader through the basic concept of crowdsourcing and participatory culture, and lays out the structure of the book. Here's this from the Intro:

The book is laid out into three sections, each roughly corresponding to themes of past, present and future. The purpose of the first section of the book is to show how four seemingly unrelated developments created conditions that made a new form of economic production not only possible but inevitable. Chapter Two will focus on how the dramatic rise in education levels coupled with increased leisure time and increased access to the Internet to create a culture of amateurism. Chapter Three will show how the open source software movement provided an intellectual framework, ideology and practical model for crowdsourcing. Chapter Four will examine how the tools of production in fields ranging from architecture to design to science and photography became accessible to the masses. Then chapter four will look at how the Internet gathered these once isolated individuals into communities that self-organize into workforces capable of efficiently allocating tasks to the appropriate members of the community.

That should prime the pump for your reading. After the jump find the start of Chapter 2: The Rise of the Amateur.

Chapter 2: The Rise of the Amateur

The Grammys and the PLUG Independent Music Awards are both annual ceremonies held to honor the finest musical accomplishments of the year. All similarities end there. The Grammys are attended by thousands of the music industry’s leading lights; PLUG is attended by a few hundred unshaven hipsters from downtown Manhattan. The Grammys are televised across the nation; PLUG would be webcast over the Internet but the organizers can never seem to get the technology worked out in time. The Grammys give winners—who generally opt to attend the ceremony—a golden statuette to honor their achievement. PLUG winners may not even know they’ve been nominated, and wouldn’t receive anything even if they showed up at the event.

It goes without saying that PLUG doesn’t take itself too seriously. The ceremony radiates ramshackle detachment, and it’s difficult to say if anyone—from the musicians to the performers to the backstage technical crew—could be labeled a professional. In fact, PLUG doesn’t have one full-time employee. This is, of course, its appeal. The audience laughs and cheers at every technical malfunction. In the PLUG bizarro world—whose orbit falls well within today’s pop cultural universe—low production values trump slickness every time.

I attended my first PLUG shortly after starting work on this book. I didn’t come for the ceremony, such as it is, but to observe the 22 amateur photographers the organizers chose to shoot the event. For their part, the photographers agreed not to charge for their time. They work for an unusual agency called iStockPhoto, which markets and sells images created by some 35,000  photographers, nearly all of them amateurs. The company took advantage of an imbalance that had emerged in the digital economy: compelling, high-resolution images had become ubiquitous, yet professional photo agencies were still treating them like a scarce resource. iStock crowdsourced their product, undercut their competitors by over 99 percent and made a killing in the process.

The iStock photographers fit right in: They were jammed into a reserved area just in front of the stage and if not for the all-access passes dangling from their necks would have been indistinguishable from the fans. This is appropriate: PLUG is essentially a festival of the raw passion and talent of the crowd, be it expressed in music or images or the stand-up comedy between the awards. PLUG celebrates everything that’s best about amateurism—authenticity, spirit, passion and perhaps most of all, a well-developed sense of humor about its own humble place in the world. At one point in the green room I complement one of the founders, Gerry Hart, on having pulled off the show at all. “Well,” he said, “We knew we’d never do it right, so we figured we’d do it wrong.”

I wanted to get to know this unusual workforce firsthand, so between performances I cornered Nick Monu, one of the iStockers. Nick looks young enough to be shooting the awards for a high-school newspaper, and in fact he’s not much older than that. Tall, handsome and intelligent, Monu has the sort of easy smile that often leads to lucrative careers selling securities, or cars, or expensive homes. From looking at him you’d never guess he represents the greatest threat to professional photography since the Kodak Instamatic started putting portrait photographers out of business.

Monu wants to be a doctor, for all the reasons people still admire that profession, and is enrolled in his third year of law school at Brown University. Nick was born in his mother’s hometown, Kiev, grew up in Lagos and went to high school in New York City. He spent much of his childhood watching his mother and father, a pediatrician and cardiologist respectively, tending to the impoverished in various Third World clinics. “My mom made helping people look fun.”

But Nick’s mother also made her two sons study art. “We both had to take piano and drawing lessons. My Mom was really serious about that.” Nick took to drawing early, and when he got to high school he started taking photographs. “When I was in high school I was doing these photo-realist paintings, and I bought a digital camera so I could project the images onto the canvas.” Soon he realized he liked taking pictures more than he liked painting them, and Nick pursued photography with the passion that has infected shutterbugs ever since George Eastman—who started as an amateur photographer himself —introduced the medium to the masses.

And if this was 1985, or 1995 or even 2002 that’s all taking pictures would be to Nick: a hobby. Instead, photography is putting Nick through medical school, with a whole lot of spending money to spare. “I made $10,000 last month,” he admits sheepishly, as if he’s committed some minor indiscretion. Not that financial success has gone to his head. “It’s still just a hobby. I don’t see why I can’t practice medicine and shoot photos at the same time.

Nick has an exclusive contract to shoot for iStockPhoto, and has come to the award ceremony by the invitation Bruce Livingstone, its tattooed, 37-year old CEO. Livingstone radically upset the cozy, insular world of stock photography with iStock’s business model. Simply a pre-existing photograph licensed for re-use, the stock image is the little white lie of publishing. That image of a beatific mother nursing her infant in a woman’s magazine? Stock. Those well-groomed, racially diverse executives on the cover of the Merrill Lynch prospectus? You might recognize them as the well-groomed, racially diverse insurance agents from the All-State brochure.

The first stock photo agency was founded in 1920, and for most of the 20th Century the industry was an afterthought, trafficking in the outtakes from commercial magazine assignments. Very few photographers tried to make a living off the market in pre-existing images alone. Rather it was a supplementary revenue stream. This changed after the desktop publishing revolution led to an explosion of magazines, and a commensurate demand for images. Suddenly photographers were making six-figures a year shooting stock images. But what technology giveth it can taketh away.

In 2000 Bruce Livingstone was running a small graphic design and Web hosting firm in Calgary. Bruce is an avid photographer himself, and over the years had developed an extensive network of photographers and designers. Early in the year he took 2,000 of his images and put them online. Anyone could download his photos in exchange for giving him an email. Livingstone’s friends decided they wanted to share their images with the public too. That June the budding community instituted a credit system: A user could download one image for every image of theirs that had been downloaded by someone else.

It was a classic example of the gift economy, the non-monetary exchange that grew up alongside the World Wide Web. Money, it has become clear, isn’t the only, or even the most important incentive driving the explosive creative output that one finds on the Internet. People contribute for the simple joy of participation, or to learn something, or even for enhanced status within a community of like-minded creators. On iStock, everyone took something and gave something in turn. Everyone profited, but no one made—or spent—a dime. Soon friends of friends heard about Bruce’s nifty idea, and started uploading their images too. Then around 2002 a wider public got wind of iStock, and the site began to hit critical mass. Soon Livingstone was paying $10,000 a month for the bandwidth to support it. He could have taken advertising to cover the cost of hosting, but felt it violated the spirit of the site. “The focus was on the community, and good design. Advertising would have cluttered the site,” says Livingstone.

Instead he started charging a quarter for each image, and opened the system up to the public. Traffic to the site, now christened iStockPhoto, started increasing exponentially. Livingstone raised the prices to $1 per image. “I thought it might become a sideline business.” It quickly became much more than that. The emergence of the Internet, digital cameras and user-friendly photo editing software combined to undermine the boom in stock photography. Suddenly anyone, it seemed, could take a half-decent picture.

The quality of the images weren’t always as high (or as consistent) as a traditional stock agency offered, but the differences were indiscernible to all but the most discriminating consumer, and you couldn’t beat the price. By 2004 a host of other so-called “micro-stocks” had sprung up with strategies similar to iStock’s. The professionals panicked. Microstock photos, they charged, were shoddy quality images that would bring on the ruin of the industry. The two goliaths of the stock image world, Getty Images and the Bill Gates-owned Corbis, promised to put up a united front against these hobbyist upstarts. But in early 2006 Getty reversed course and bought iStockPhoto for $50 million. Business is business, after all. “If someone’s going to cannibalize your business, better it be one of your other businesses,” Getty CEO Jonathan Klein told me shortly after the sale. Smaller magazines, non-profit organizations and all manner of Web sites have continued to flock to iStock’s high volume, low-cost model. As of June 2007 iStockPhoto had 1.2 million regular customers purchasing photographs, video footage, illustrations and animations. Though Getty won’t say exactly how much revenue iStock has brought into the company, the number has more than tripled since the acquisition, making it Getty’s fastest-growing, and most profitable, business. “Bruce’s brilliance,” Getty CEO Jonathan Klein once told me, “is that he turned community into commerce.”

“And I turned commerce into community,” Bruce adds, when I remind him about Klein’s comment as we lounge on a sofa in the green room during the PLUG awards. It’s true. iStock offers the budding shutterbug all manner of free tutorials, and the forums buzz with questions about lens sizes, Polarized filters and F-Stop settings. iStock doesn’t offer a chance to get rich. It offers the chance to make friends and become a better photographer. “iStock is its community,” says Livingstone simply.

iStock is one of the primary sponsors of PLUG. In fact Livingstone helped start it. In 2001 Livingstone and Gerry Hart, an old friend from his punk rock days, decided to take their passion for mixed tapes and turn it into an awards show. “It was really born of a disdain for the MTV awards and every other awards ceremony.” Now in it’s sixth year, PLUG displays their deep devotion to the amateur ethos.

For a while I sit in the green room talking to Bruce, Gerry and the musicians. But eventually I meander back down to the main floor to watch the action. I’ve covered music for years, often in tandem with a photographer. Rock photographers and writers tend to gravitate to their calling for the same reason: a passion for the music. Then the calling becomes a career, and at some point a job. The beer-sticky floors lose their appeal, and bands blend into one another. The professional music journalist posture becomes one of studied detachment, and they can be spotted in any crowd as the ones not bobbing their heads or tapping their feet to the music, but writing in a notebook with a vague smirk on their faces.

Louis and the other iStockers, then, are a study in contrast. By the end of the closing act, Louis has cast his equipment bag to the floor and begun banging his head in the rhythm with the music. He holds his camera above his head and is taking exposures blindly, carelessly, joyfully. He looks at me, smiles, and hoists his index and pinkie fingers into devil horns, that universal sign of rock’n’roll abandon.

Comments

[Joshua McKenty]

Jeff,

Here's the obvious criticism - experts are part of the crowd, too. While I agree that it's the rise of the spirit of amateurism that's made crowdsourcing so effective, looking at projects such as "Idea Crossing", "Innocentive", or even the open-source movement that you reference above, all lean heavily on their power to find the best expert in the crowd.

You might also want to highlight more prominently the number of photographers - (22!) shooting a single event. This is yet another classic facet of crowdsourcing - the seemingly magical power of large numbers.

On a positive note, I think presenting these concepts through a series of stories is a beautiful approach, and I hope to see more of that throughout the book.

Finally, although I didn't see it mentioned in the outline, are you going to spare some pages for a brief mention of the various "crowdfunding" efforts? I've made arguments before on the validity of these as part of the field.
http://blog.bountyup.com/2007/12/13/a-primer-on-social-commerce-crowdsourcing-crowdfunding-and-community/

A great kickoff - I'm looking forward to more.

Thanks,

Joshua McKenty
http://BountyUp.com

[Alan]

All right Jeff, great chapter. The temp here is Chicago is minus 15 F, one day to be glad to have A Beautiful Day (Under the Florescent Lights!)

A couple of comments:

“Money, it has become clear, isn’t the only, or even the most important incentive driving the explosive creative output that one finds on the Internet.”
Hard to say where the importance level might be regarding the almighty dollar and explosive creative output on the internet. I suspect that the collision between a naturally tech savvy generation and the availability of a “feel right” medium might be closer to the mark!

“Kodak Instamatic started putting portrait photographers out of business.”
With more than 50 million Instamatic Cameras produced by 1970 I am surprised that the pro’s where not jumping off of rooftops and out of windows!
As of April 2005 there were in excess of 50 million blogs. Are news papers going to go the way of portrait photographers, out of vogue!

“PLUG celebrates everything that’s best about amateurism—authenticity, spirit, passion and perhaps most of all, a well-developed sense of humor about its own humble place in the world.” A great sentence and great marker on the journey to world domination by the rise of amateurs!

Alan

[olin]

How about crowdfundig? Check out http://www.byualternativecommencement.com/. A bunch of students using ChipIn raised over $23,000 in a few days from a bunch of small donations to set up an alternative to their official commencement address by Dick Cheney.

[Todd]

What globalisation is doing at the macro level to create new industrial powerhouses, crowdsourcing is fuelling at the micro level for services industries. By opening up opportunities to bypass traditional barriers-to-entry, crowdsourcing services such as iStockPhoto are levelling the playing field by giving both amateurs and professionals equal means for reaping financial benefit from their tacit abilities.

[Daren C. Brabham]

Good stuff, Jeff. Well-written and engaging, even if I do take aim at some of your claims :-)

Concerning the book as a whole, I think the claims about 1) the crowd being comprised of amateurs, 2) the importance of community at crowdsourcing sites, and 3) crowdsourcing’s roots in the open source movement should be cautiously crafted.

First, the amateurism assumption. I don't disagree that perhaps a majority of the iStockers at iStockphoto are technically amateurs in the sense that they probably had not, and maybe never would have, made money from their photographic efforts without the mechanism of iStockphoto. But cases like InnoCentive, where a brief glance at the winners' gallery shows a lot of Ph.D.s, make it seem like the crowd is more expert than amateur (as was said above). To split hairs a bit, Karim Lakhani et al. (2007) found that many of the winners at InnoCentive were winning challenges outside of the scope of their expertise. So, while they all have advanced science degrees, the materials engineers aren't winning the materials engineering challenges. Instead, the biologists are. It's a testament to the magic of interdisciplinarity to solve problems more than it is a testament to the magic of amateur vision.

A study I recently completed (Brabham, 2008b) found that iStockers consider themselves professionals, and the average iStocker has had multi-year experience in formal artistic training, as well as multi-year experience in both paid and unpaid creative work. This is to say that we should be careful about how we talk about professionalism and amateurism. I think these terms are far muddier than we assume, and perhaps we can think of it as a pro-am spectrum. If we define amateurism by a lack of professional training or professional experience, then the crowd at iStockphoto, at InnoCentive, and at other crowdsourcing sites is certainly not that amateurish. If we define amateurism by if and how much people are paid for their crowdsourcing work, then the pro-am spectrum is further complicated. Think, for example, of the doctor who makes a ton of money at iStock. Is she likely to ever view her photography work as “professionally” as her medical practice? Money may not be the best measure of professionalism, either. I think one of Jeff’s interesting implicit commentaries about the crowd is that we have begun to adopt fragmented professional identities as we’ve developed markets to match our varied hobbies and interests.

On the importance of community, I am cautious about saying these crowdsourcing companies are communities from which creative production springs. It may be the other way around, or they may be co-emergent. Community, incidentally, is a common watch word in crowdsourcing. Take, for example, Threadless parent company skinnyCorp’s motto: “skinnyCorp creates communities.” Again, in my recent study at iStockphoto, respondents indicated a lack of interest in making friends and networking at the site, and much more of an interest in making money and developing individual photography skills. Crowdsourcing companies may start as communities, but when they mature, the members interested in chatting in forums and networking with other members of the crowd fall into the minority as financial and other individual interests take priority.

Finally, I absolutely agree that the principles that make open source production work are translatable to crowdsourcing. But, as I argue in a recent article (Brabham, 2008a, pp. 81-83), crowdsourcing is not the same as open source. I make this distinction primarily on the overhead costs and risk needed to make tangible goods in crowdsourcing, as opposed to virtual, ones-and-zeros software products in open source production. Motivations for participation are different between crowdsourcing and open source communities, and the investment needed to produce a tangible good requires a greater degree of centralization in crowdsourcing, and subsequently requires a copyright/ownership framework.

These criticisms are not to say that Jeff Howe is wrong in his crowdsourcing claims, only to qualify some of them with some cautionary tales and data. Jeff, you’re blazing new ground with this crowdsourcing stuff, and it’s great that you’re setting up several questions for us researchers eager to learn more about this killer business model.

Cheers!

db

---

Brabham, D.C. (2008a). Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving: An introduction and cases. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14(1), 75-90.

Brabham, D.C. (2008b). [Moving the crowd at iStockphoto: The composition of the crowd and motivations for participation in crowdsourcing applications]. Unpublished raw data. Temporarily available online at http://www.darenbrabham.com/istock.html

Lakhani, K.R., Jeppesen, L.B., Lohse, P.A., & Panetta, J.A. (2007). The value of openness in scientific problem solving (Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 07-050). Available online at http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-050.pdf

[Al;an]

Greetings Daren; the amateurism assumption, is it about making money or not having had some formal training in a particular area of expertise? The crowd might indeed have a variety of credentials, but are those credentials in the area of chosen involvement?
I do agree that its testament to interdisciplinarity, is that a word, it sounds right, although with the amateur it might be a much more complicated than just vision.
There appears to have been a timeliness element that provided the ground for the rise of amateurism on the net. That and what I would call the intersection of a generation, with some fringe ages, that having grown up with technology and therefore are able to identify and use it in a completely intuitive manner. I wonder if the focus is now much more upon the process/personal interest/vision and aims part rather than the underlying technological usages. Have this present generation of users been released, to a great extent, from the usual constraints of managing that which enables the process.

This generational metamorphosis in the relationship between the user and the technology I believe is a very important factor that underlies much of what is transpiring.

I am also wondering if the use of the word community is problematic because we are still using the word in its traditional sense. Might this new community be a community driven by relationships to the tasks at hand, a changed relationship to work, personal achievement and fulfillment? Not so much reliant upon the need to connect in physical space and time, but still bound by generational factors and by like physiologies and aims? Virtual communities bound but not by what has provided cohesion in the past!

What one sees happening on the web is very complimentary to that thought. Cloud Computing is on the move in a very big way.

The iStockphoto model does provide the material elements to enable this but it also pulls us back to past identifiers and thereby creates confusion.
I could not link to your data on motivations study at iStockphoto.com
Is there any way I can get to your articles and study?

Warm regards, Alan

[Luke Peterson]

fyi - Brown has a medical school but not a law school. You mention the one student at both.

[BadgerGravling]

I heartily agree with the view that the term 'amateur' doesn't always reflect the actual make-up of a crowd sourced group.
Whether it's Linux, IStockPhoto, Wikipedia et al, there is always a mixture of those who may have professional training, those who have qualifications, and those who have practical knowledge, alongside those who are what would be traditionally called 'amateur'.

And in getting successful results, crowdsourcing needs to draw on all these individuals and give them all a way to connect.

[Monica Hamburg]

Love this chapter, Jeff, as it reads beautifully.

My chief concern is with the "money" statements. Though compensation is not key (passion often is more of a motivator, it appears, for the crowd to contribute) it is in some respects very important and integral, and quality sometimes, is linked to this element. Someone with great skills but only a small amount of spare time, may contribute sporadically to a site from which they will earn nothing or very little, but proportionally, they are more apt to contribute more if they are better compensated. In particular, someone like Nick Monu, while he may love taking photos, may have provided far less of his work to Istock during the busy period of his education, if it wasn’t in fact paying for that education.

I agree with a few commenters above that it is unfair to paint the entire crowd of non-professionals with the amateur brush, especially in the case of artists, where only a small percentage of talented people tend to make a living with their art. Further, it is important to remember that while some people may be quite experienced and proficient at a specific career, they may not (or may no longer) be employed in that area professionally (e.g. people who have transitioned from one occupation to another). They have expertise and knowledge in areas related their previous vocation, if they do not pursue it full time. While both these categories are not defined as “professionals”, they should certainly not be classified as amateurs.

And, although I certainly have my own concerns about crowdsourcing, another aspect that I think is missing here (though that might be coming up in another chapter)is that in some cases (especially with Istock) this “rise of the amateur” can give power back to the artists and allow them to be successful on their own terms(e.g. Lise Gagné). In these instances, hardworking artists are able to focus on producing the content (and in many cases also helping their peers by critiquing their work), enjoy a community and leave the business elements of exposure, promotion and payment to someone else (in this case the Crowdsourcing company). The artist is visible to many possible purchasers with minimal time investment. Crowdsourcing and social media in general can sometimes even the playing field and give artists more avenues to sell their work(e.g.
deviant art) and allow closer/direct contact with the consumers.

And while it would be ideal for photographers to be paid handsomely for each photo they sell, many would rather have the option of earning $1000 for their photo to be purchased by many rather than have their photo be priced at $400 and sold only once.

[Alan Booker]

Here is a very interesting post from Kevin Kelly.
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/02/the_bottom_is_n.php

Alan

[hyokon]

I am very interested in crowdsourcing. Probably one of two modes in which crowds (with 'clouds' of Internet) work in the future, the other being what I call mass niche. See http://www.paragraphr.com/pages/show/11.

If you used http://paragraphr.com, our web service with wich you can receive feedback and revise by paragraph, I am sure it will be more productive for you and the commenters. Many comments here quote your writing, and with paragraphr it is not or less neccessary. It is still a very early experimentation, but will work just fine for this.

[Howard]

Nick is obviously very talented and hard working. However, for everyone making ten thousand dollars a month taking photos there are ten thousand making one dollar a month. Also, I don’t see Nick giving any amateur appendectomies. Clearly, there are professions where amateurs cannot exist. Nevertheless, I admire Nick’s work ethic and I wish him the best.

[Emchi]

In the UK, a good example of the rise of the amatuer could be sited by the use of b3ta or more specifically Joel Veitch. For those of you who haven't seen rathergood.com it's worth a visit. He created a rather random low tech video of cats singing along to various pieces of music (he created them with human mouths).

Again, rather randomly, a flavoured milk drink called Crusha (not sure if you have it in the US), started using the rathergood.com concept, down to the hilt of cats singing along to music to advertise their product. It's pure genius in the market it's catering to, not only is it going to make children laugh to see singing cats, but those who have see Joel Veitch's work are part of the target audience because they *know* what it actually is.

Having had experience of working for an advertising agency, it's obvious that someone in an agency has seen Veitch's work, thought it was hillarious and worked out a way of pitching it to their client. Thus an idea is born, why create an idea from scratch, in house, when there's a solution already out there and waiting for you to use?

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