Crowdsourcing "Good vs. Evil" continues to come up in our conversations with creative people. It seems that this debate is going to get rerun and regurgitated more often than The Real Housewives of Atlanta. A lot of creatives are thrown off or even scared of what crowdsourcing will do to them. The standard stigma that's attached to it is the phrase "devaluing creative." As in "what you guys are doing is just devaluing creative." The dismissive attitude or, in some cases, fear surrounding crowdsourcing within the "established" creative community is irrational.
What most creatives fear is that there isn't enough creative work to go around. Right now, at this moment, this is rational. They've experienced years of grueling spec work, trying to get noticed, waiting for their break and eventually getting it. Now that they're established, working and successful--it's almost as if their afraid of their younger selves. I know what most passionate people are willing to do to get their chance at their dream creative occupation. I know what I'd do to me, and I'm scared too.
Examine for a moment the market and the reason why crowdsourcing has become such a hot button issue. There are far more out of work creatives than working creatives. Crowdsourcing just makes this market more efficient. This is especially true at a time when businesses will need more and more content. First and foremost, the way that content gets generated will have to change and that new demand in the market will be met with new businesses that facilitate that, like ours.
The reason we launched a crowdsourcing platform @tongal was for good, and mostly because of negative experience within the film/tv community. Over the past 10 years in Hollywood, the top creative have developed an increasing stranglehold on the work. As a result, most creatives were either working for absolutely nothing or very little while the top creatives were quite honestly, getting rich for what amounted to sub par work in many cases. This happens in a subjective business mostly because of perception and because of traditional barriers to entry. Take the WGA, for example, who, during its strike threatened sites like "ask a ninja" by saying "if you continue to do this, you will never be a member of our union." That's like saying "I don't want you to join my country club," and then "you can't go play golf at this public course down the street." What are they afraid of? Basically, we believe that 20th century barriers to entry like the WGA (and misconceptions that artists should be well paid as a whole) have created a very "have and have not" dynamic in the creative world.
Same is true in the ad world. I have had friends who spent or borrowed huge sums of money to create spec commercial reels that get ignored by gatekeepers such as agents who thrive on the commodity of scarcity, and as a result, their hard work goes completely unseen by the businesses who the work was intended for. What crowdsourcing is doing, and why people think it's scary (irrationally) is giving those people, like my friends, a chance to interact directly with the business that is willing to pay them for what they're aspiring to do for a living. Traditionally, these gatekeepers are the reason that so much creative was out of work and others were grossly overpaid. I'm not saying this to devalue what creative people do. I myself am a creative person (someone who actually has been paid to write screenplays) however, it's a fact, not an opinion that creative work has been overpaid, despite how we all may feel personally.
Take a look at a market for work that is super efficient--for instance, the market for accountants. You probably don't know many out of work accountants. In large, they are well paid and the best ones are extremely well paid. Being an accountant isn't as interesting or sexy as being a commercial director or a copywriter, but the market has set the price of an accountant appropriately. Conversely, for good or bad, there are more aspiring creatives than accountants. Now as the price is dropping, and demand is increasing, there will be more creative jobs, just more diversification of the creative wealth.
There will always, always be high paying jobs for top creative, however we're certain that in the middle, businesses want a fresh voice at a lower cost and the chance to potentially develop a new top creative's career. At the same time, we want to provide opportunity by creating more opportunity.
What crowdsourcing can provide, by lowering the cost of creative (not devaluing) is an increase in the demand for what creative people do. More demand, lower cost, more jobs, and eventually, better work by spreading the creative wealth around.
