Rewarding Users for Contributing Data

Four months ago I spoke to a real estate guy with a great mobile platform who wanted to gather user data about places (similar to Platial) and resell the data via a mobile app. He was planning to pay the people who contributed geographic information based on who chose to buy their map layer. I thought that wasn't a winner: he was simply paying people a little bit so he could take a lot. Since then I've been pondering incentives and rewards. Marc's blank faces post (give your users reasons to contribute their data) rang a bell, so I wrote up my conclusions on the subject. Here they are.

Users should contribute data for a reason other than "Nat's business model is predicated on collecting user-generated data". The best reasons give a reward that's related to the data. BitTorrent gives you fast downloads if you are in turn offering fast uploads; you're rewarded in bandwidth for offering bandwidth.

Community is a good reason: my theory is that Amazon reviewers and list makers are passionate book-lovers contributing data because it builds their place in this community. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about Yahoo! Local Reviews because it's not a site that has a community and so I have trouble finding incentives, rewards, or reasons for contributing reviews other than you feel particularly passionate about a particular restaurant. End result: I predict Yahoo! will get only extreme reviews from a minority of the population. A quick check of restaurants in my area show extremes in ratings, despite there being a lot of mediocre restaurants around.

Self-interest is a good motivator: eBay feedback began as a way to weed out the fraudsters making life miserable for marketplace participants, and by contributing information on whether they were good traders you were helping to promote good trading. Now the feedback's more of a ritual ("AAAA+++++!!!!! BEst sellerr evaH! !!!").

The worst kind of reward is money, I think. There was talk of MSN search paying people to use them. That's completely disconnecting the reward from the behaviour. The best reward for searching is relevant results. And guess what? The site with the most relevant results is also the top search site.

Money, and any other type of reward that substitutes for money such as vouchers or access to powerful site features (e.g., features that would otherwise be subscription-limited) encourages deceit and gaming. If you pay me to search, I'll search when I don't need to (just to make money), advertisers will be getting impressions that aren't useful to them, and it'll drive the price of impressions down. Because you can't reward people for the quality of the data they contribute, you have to settle for the act of contributing something. And once the reward is worth money, you'll get people contributing crap just to get the rewards. Your reward system is now paying people to piss in your data pool. That hasn't happened yet for Chris Sells's offer to share royalties in return for Amazon reviews, but that's only because of the scale he's operating at. Needless to say, the rules are also different for intranet applications rather than public Internet applications.

Leaderboards are similarly problematic. Competitions as motivation for contributing data are workable, but only if you can validate the data cheaply. Otherwise you'll have people submitting bogus data just to get a higher position on the leaderboard. See any Orkut profile with >300 "friends" for an example of this in action.

So if you're asking people to contribute movie reviews then you should have a site that's serving a movie-loving community (people with passionate opinions who will want to express them), or it should improve their site experience (you can now recommend other movies they'd like and other users whose tastes they share). You shouldn't send them movie vouchers, you shouldn't give the review contributors access to more detailed information about the movies, and you absolutely shouldn't send them a quarterly check for 25c/movie reviewed.

This is related to, but different from, Napster-style contribute-by-default behaviour. You reward when you have to elicit data that the people don't already have. Napster shared the files people had already downloaded. If you had to get people to rip their CDs, you'd turn to rewards and reasons for contributing data.