Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

In case you haven’t heard of it, Crowd Sourcing is the idea that you take a project or problem and distribute it amongst “the crowd”. The crowd then becomes a partner to help solve your problem or complete your project. In many cases, using the crowd is beneficial as they don’t have as much overhead as internal employees (job security, suggesting ideas which are too risky, wanting to save face, etc.), but they may not fully understand the business problem or issues at hand, so you might not always get exactly what you want, or expect.

In the creative community, crowd sourcing is often celebrated and chastised in the same breath. On one hand, it opens up a realm of new possibilities that would have been otherwise kept within the walled gardens of agencies or large and small businesses. It also allows for agencies and businesses to tap into a much larger community above and beyond their in-house creatives. Inherent in this is the fact that there are no guarantees for the work you receive.

On the other hand, at least until the marketplace learns the value of what they’re getting, it drives down the cost of creative a bit. This is mostly due to buyers being cautious of the new marketplace and evaluating risk versus reward.

In my opinion, the net-net is a positive impact on the creative scene as a whole. As such, I’ve decided to showcase some of the creative marketplaces available and I’ll leave it to you to make the decision as to whether they provide a fair value for the work being done on a case by case basis.

Threadless (Medium of choice: T-shirts)
If you live in Chicago, you know about Threadless. Although personally I think the best shirts I have from them are printed on American Apparel tees and not their house brand, I’d still recommend that creatives looking to expand into t-shirt designs definitely submit them to Threadless. They have a rabid fan base and provide tons of valuable feedback on each design.

CrowdSpring (Medium of choice: Logos, stationary, websites, and more)
CrowdSpring is meant as a creative hub for all digital media creation. If you need a business card, CrowdSpring can do it. If you need a logo, CrowdSpring. If you need a website designed (just the layout), CrowdSpring. They have tons of projects that are constantly being created and plenty of opportunities for testing new creative ideas.

Denook (Medium of choice: Logos, stationary, websites, and more)
Although similar in function to Crowd Spring, Denook doesn’t have the coolest community manager around.

Genius Rocket (Medium of choice: Videos)
Genius Rocket is a crowd sourced community around video creation; ads specifically. A client creates a creative brief, a prize is assigned, and voila, the creative community gets to work. Churning out ads as fast as they can be reviewed. If you’re trying to get your foot in the door doing video work, why not try your hand at creating videos with a real purpose and win some cash in the meantime?

PopTent (Medium of choice: Videos)
PopTent is much the same as genius rocket, but they have a slightly different videographer audience. Whereas genius rocket is open to anyone to submit a video, PopTent only allows for select video creators to compete for the projects created. Contact PopTent to see if you can be added to their list of select vendors.

YouTube Contests (Medium of choice: Videos)
And last, but not least, we have YouTube contests. Again, what better way to get your feet wet than to say “I won the Home Depot green video contest“.

Did I forget any other sites? Am I completely missing some aspect of this controversial creative medium? Let me know in the comments.