Viralogy

Crowdsourcing:

1. 1. “Delegating a task to a large diffuse group, usually without monetary compensation”;
   2. “The act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to a group (crowd) of people or community in the form of an open call.”

Source: Wiktionary, Wikipedia

What do lolcats, web design, hilarious photos and videos, and 3D building renderings all have in common? They’re taking the capabilities and cooperation of the internet and building an entirely new world of content. Twenty years ago, nearly all of the television, radio and print media that we consumed was created and developed by a select few. Today, users can create and proliferate content to a massive audience in a way that has never existed before.

Crowdsourcing is nothing new to the internet – it’s been going on for over five years now. However, it is becoming more and more popular in the blog and social media space, as bloggers and marketers alike employ the skills and talents of a group to create a vast amount of content that could never be made by a small team of people.

Crowdsourcing Cheezburgers

Arguably the most prolific and successful content producer using crowdsourced material is a blog that practically epitomizes internet phenomena. I Can Has Cheezburger is the home of lolcats and thousands upon thousands of photos of animals (mostly cats) juxtaposed with hilarious captions. ICHC was initially the work of two bloggers, Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami. It wasn’t until the site grew and was purchased by Ben Huh that it was able to truly realize its potential.

These days, the ideas are entirely user-generated and submitted. Instead of the select writers, comedians and designers from the media of old, with user-generated content, there are only editors. The only staff on hand maintains the website and helps out with the editorial selection process. And that’s the biggest reason that the ICHC network generates 1 BILLION pageviews every four months.* In an old world model, they would not have nearly enough content to serve such a large audience.
*In early October 2009, they were receiving 8.2 million pageviews per day.

The I Can Has Cheezburger network contains over 20 sites including Failblog and GraphJam . Each site is driven by its users and has easy-to-follow instructions for how to submit content. “The mission of our company is to make people happy for five minutes a day,” says Huh, “the game is listening to what [the users] have to say.”

Why Crowdsourcing Works

Crowdsourcing works for I Can Has Cheezburger because it simplifies their process. It took a world of hilarious ideas having to do with one central theme (or internet meme), and gave each idea the opportunity to stand on its own regardless of the author. Where every late night comedian you watch has a team of writers to crunch out a series of jokes and punchlines for each five minute segment, Ben Huh realized that he could harness the collective intellect of the internet to create simple, satisfying humor.

“Human nature has a tendency to admire complexity, but reward simplicity.”
-Ben Huh

ICHC does not need complex humor to survive. In fact, the site succeeds primarily because of its simplicity. Rather than creating a long leadup using a multifaceted wit, the idea of lolcats is predicated on slapstick, easy-to-understand humor. And that’s where user-generated content flourishes.

Case Study: GraphJam vs. Indexed

I Can Has Cheezburger-network site GraphJam is written by nobody. And everybody. GraphJam offers a template for different types of graph-based jokes (Venn Diagram, Bar Graph, Line Graph, Pie Chart), and allows anyone to submit content. There’s even a GraphJam Chart Builder if you’re too lazy. The charts aren’t pretty or graphically beautiful in any way, but they are absolutely hilarious. Between 3 and 5 posts are made each day.

Indexed is also a graph-based site. In contrast with GraphJam, it is written by one woman, Jessica Hagy. She combines Venn diagrams, line graphs and a sharp wit to create a new, humorous, (pseudo) math-based post each day, hand-written on an index card. Indexed was also featured as one of Time Magazine’s Top Blogs of 2008 and was nominated for a Webby for Best Blog in 2008.

One site is intricately put together and lovingly created by one author, and drawn by hand, having been honored as a top blog on many occasions. Yet GraphJam, the site featuring entirely user-generated content that posts multiple times a day gets over five times the traffic on a bad day. GraphJam benefits from nearly endless possibilities and different voices due to its user-generated content.

The I Can Has Cheezburger network benefits from an extremely simple system and an extremely engaged userbase. The beauty of blogs, social media and user-submitted content is that it challenges the very principles upon which media is built. We’re no longer a slave to one person or one team’s content anymore. If you have the right idea and a motivated and engaged audience, you can create a much more robust and diverse experience than ever before.

Do you believe in crowdsourced blog content? Or do you prefer a unified and central content producer (such as a writing team or solitary author)? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Jaremy Rich writes a gaming, marketing and technology blog called Techshots. He also loves math-based humor.