Where would you go if you needed to nd hundreds of people each willing to take on
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Daniel Maloney, an AOL executive, recently turned to crowdsourcing for help inventorying AOL's vast video library. He broke the large job into micro-tasks and described the tasks that he needed to be done on Mechanical Turk. In particular, each worker was asked to find Web pages containing a video and identifies the video's source and location on those pages. The over half a million workers that were registered at Mechanical Turk could read about the tasks and decide if they wanted to perform them.
Using the crowdsourcing service, the AOL project took less than a week to get up and running and only a couple of month stor each completion. The total cost was about as much as it would have been to hire two temp workers for the same period.
Mr. Maloney was pleased with the cost savings and added: "We had a very high number of pages we needed to process. Being able to tap into a scaled work force was massively helpful." 32 However, he really didn't know very much about the workers who did the work for AOL and he likely had to make sure that their work was done correctly.
Read the case study answer the following questions:
1. Is crowdsourcing as used by AOL a form of outsourcing? Why or why not?
2. What steps do you think Maloney might have taken to ensure that the crowdsourcing would be a success for the inventory project?
3. What factors should be considered when deciding whether or not to crowdsource a particular part of a business?
4. Describe the advantages and disadvantages of crowdsourcing.
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Related Book For
Managerial Communication Strategies and Applications
ISBN: 978-1483358550
6th edition
Authors: Geraldine E. Hynes
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