How Crowdsourcing Will Ultimately Add Value

Most publishers cringe at the thought of crowdsourcing. Publishers often believe they exclusively own the art of content curation and they feel threatened when they sense others encroaching on their turf.

It's hard to argue with that logic, especially in our disrupted world where the publisher's role is under attack from self-publishing, free content, and authors with their own platforms. That's why every publisher should rethink the role they play and determine how to remain relevant in the years to come.

I believe crowdsourcing will eventually be a very powerful tool for all publishers. One of the key problems with crowdsourcing today is that it's little more than a buzzword and most crowdsourcing efforts are poorly coordinated and leveraged.

Imagine this scenario in the future: A newspaper publisher allows members of their community to create remixes of the paper's original content. Additionally, they not only allow, but they actually encourage the community to integrate it with content from other sources, including the "competition". These derivative works will benefit from the interests and curation skills of highly passionate community members. It's a blend of bloggers and "professional" content, for example.

What's in it for the community curators? If the publishers are smart, they'll create affiliate programs where the publisher sells access to these crowdsource remixes and the curators earn a share of the resulting revenue. This also helps those curators build brand names of their own, potentially ones the newspaper might want to hire full time. Think of it as a feeder system for new content talent.

Now let's look at the opportunity for book publishers. What if the publisher allowed the community to create their own editions of books? Let's say you want to read that new blockbuster book about marketing strategies. What if a marketing guru read it before you, highlighted all the critical elements, and inserted additional, relevant notes from their years of experience? Now you have a book that has significantly more value than the original edition. The publisher can probably charge more for this edition and pay the marketing guru a portion of the incremental revenue. Over time you'd see multiple digital editions of books. Would you pay more for the "Seth Godin Edition" of that marketing strategy book, where Godin didn't write it but he highlighted the important stuff and inserted a bunch of related insights?

Most existing publishers will balk at all of this, worrying about the additional layers of complexity, a modified review process, etc. As the incumbents reject it we'll see yet another new chapter of The Innovator's Dilemma unfolding right in front of us as startups will fill the void; after all, startups don't worry about new processes and whether it's OK to break the old rules.