Earlier this year I covered a new study that revealed the pretty poor ‘success rate’ of crowdsourcing projects. The study found that just 10% of crowdsourcing managed to generate even 1 new idea/submission per month.

The study underlined the challenges involved in inviting the crowd into a process. One of the biggest of these is around community management, and a second study revealed that there are unique challenges even when a challenge is highly popular.

It emerged that there was an inverse relationship between the popularity of each challenge, and the eventual direction taken by the sponsoring organization. The more participants there were, the less likely the organization was to take a novel and unique course of action.

The bystander effect

What of crowdsourced efforts whereby the majority don’t contribute but rather consume the work of others? Wikipedia, for instance, has infinitely more users that simply read content rather than edit entries.

This is commonly known as the bystander effect, whereby when there are many potential people to lend assistance, people assume that others will step up, and therefore don’t bother to do so themselves.

Studies have found that a similar phenomenon occurs online, but when it comes to crowdsourcing, are people put off by a large crowd?

A recent study suggests that this is nothing to be concerned about, and indeed is probably the natural way of things.

“In most social undertakings, there is a group that actually joins forces and works,” the authors say. “And there is a group of free-riders that typically benefits from work being done, without contributing much.”

Getting the work done

The researchers created a simulation whereby participants were randomly told to either contribute or freeload on the efforts of others. The aim was to see if there was an optimum size of crowd whereby problems were efficiently solved.

The optimum crowd size turned out not to be the largest possible, but rather around half of this maximum size.

When the crowd was too small, it contained too few contributors to be effective, especially ones with the level of thought diversity to prove effective.

When the crowd was increased in size however, the freeloaders tended to defect and work on their own, safe in the knowledge that they could still benefit from the work of the rest, whilst also reaping the rewards of a solution they themselves come up with.

The next task is to put this theory to the test in real live crowds to see whether it holds water in reality. Rest assured, I’ll endeavour to cover it here when that study is published.