9 More Crowdsourcing Predictions from the Leaders for 2011

After the huge interest in our first batch of 11 crowdsourcing predictions for 2011, the Crowd Leaders, CEOs, & major players have responded with even more support for the coming year.

Employment

2011 will be the year that a notable amount of people quit their day jobs and work full time in crowdsourcing markets because they can make equivalent earnings and work on their own schedule.
-Niel Robertson, CEO of Trada

Demand

The crowd will *start* to look for platforms to provide group benefits, tax filing, wellness programs, etc. The trend will probably start with health care benefits, but will expand to other value-added offerings typically available in larger corporations. This will only start to pop up in 2011 but will grow to be more important in 2012 and beyond.
-Kyle Hawke, co-founder & CEO of Whinot

Investment

In 2011 I think that crowdfunding is going to move from the realm of the benefactor to the the more serious investor and will become a viable funding model for entrepreneurs. It represents a chance for entrepreneurs to hold onto control of their companies and will be seen as a way for investors to spread their investment risk over a few companies.
-Connor Doherty, Seedups

Specialties

Crowdsourcing companies will become more specialized by focusing on solving problems in specific verticals or industries.
-Matt Fisher, EVP and GM of LiveOps

Opportunities

As crowdsourcing companies grow and reputation systems are refined, individual professionals can earn increasing amounts of freelance income by joining the right crowds.
-Matt Johnston, VP of Marketing & Community of uTest

Services

We will also see an increase in the number of companies specializing on various areas of expertise. While we’ve heard much news about companies that offer crowdsourced design work, we are seeing an increase in mission-critical services, like crowdsourced fundraising and even an expansion to services like crowdsourced legal advice.
-Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower

Payoffs

While crowdsourcing has been an investment hotbed for VC firms during the past few years, 2011 is the year when it will break through with some high-profile exit activity. In other words, don’t be surprised to see more than one crowdsourcing IPOs or major M&As in the coming year.
-Matt Johnston, VP of Marketing & Community of uTest

Acceptance

More companies outside of Silicon Valley startups and tech companies will get comfortable using crowdsourcing for core parts of their business strategy. We will see enterprise companies among the leading adopters of crowdsourcing.
-Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower

Lead Generation

Sales organization will move away from traditional “list and lead” brokers for business intelligence and will increasingly use the crowdsourcing community as a reference resource to harvest business intelligence and sales lead information dynamically from public web sites.
-Greg Curhan, CEO of clickworker.com, Inc.