Crowdsourcing Business Model. The crowdsourcing business model…
By: Kapil Khanwani
Tags: Business, Wikipedia, Entrepreneur, Crowdfunding, Entrepreneurship

The crowdsourcing business model implements the model by involving the contribution of the user to the product. Crowdsourcing touches across all social and business interactions. The revenue structure is quite weird and difficult to understand for most of the users. In other words, the process takes place by combining with other business and revenue models to create an ultimate solution for the user and to earn money. Thousands of users across the world are connected to the internet and have the authority to contribute their ideas and modify the existing ones by making them more efficient.

C rowdsourcing = Crowd acts as a source for a specific platform

Wikipedia is one of the best examples of a crowdsourcing platform. Wikipedia is a multilingual online encyclopedia, based on open collaboration through a wiki-based content editing system. It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the World Wide Web and is one of the most popular websites ranked by Alexa as of June 2019. It features exclusively free content and no commercial ads and is owned and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization funded primarily through donations. Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.

Key Partners

Key partners are the relationships that you have with other business, governmental, or non-consumer entities that help your business model work. These can be the relationships that your company has with your suppliers, your manufacturers, business partners, etc. Wikipedia has 30 lakh registered editors, 2 lakh active editors, organizations, publishers, collaborators and donors which act as its key partners.

Key Activities

Key activities consist of the activities that lead the company towards their goal with ease. The key activities include the content edition, review of changes, versions in other languages, updates, quality of writing, hardware operations and support, internal research and operational development.

Key Resources

Key Resources act as a building block describing the most important assets needed to make a business model work. The number of contributors over the globe act as a key resource.

Value Propositions

Value Propositions are the services or features or their innovations that make their product look attractive to the customers. Wikipedia is a platform that is editable by any person. It has around 40 million articles in 250 different languages which is the largest in the world. The number of unique visitors of Wikipedia is 500 million each month.

Customer Relationships

Customer Relationships describe the ways that a company will engage with its customers to improve the customer experience. Wikipedia maintains its customer relationships through community, online and learning resources.

Customer Segments

The customer segmentation is the practice of dividing a customer base into groups of individuals that are similar in specific ways. Students, Researchers fall under each customer segment of Wikipedia’s Business Model.

Channels

Channels are through which the company provides its service to the customers. The internet, mobile application, websites, store.

Cost Structure

Cost structure refers to the types and relative proportions of fixed and variable costs that a business incurs. The cost structure of Wikipedia includes fixed and variable costs, technical development costs, fundraising costs.

Revenue Streams

A revenue stream is a source of revenue of a company or organization. In business, a revenue stream is generally made up of either recurring revenue, transaction-based revenue, project revenue, or service revenue. Wikipedia’s revenue works on the donation-based revenue model. The company gets most of its funds in the form of donations from the globe. The revenue streams of Wikipedia include donations and merchandising.