The contribution revolution: Why do people contribute?

There are many ways how people can contribute and help companies build their ecosystem.

• Shoppers on Amazon automatically contribute to a recommendation system by making purchases, rating items, sellers and by leaving comments and sharing experiences. Today, information will decide about your competitive advantage, so it is important to design your business to benefit from collecting data of users' actions by product.
• Del.icio.us allows users to organize their bookmarks and create from that a web index that they use for suggestions to other, similar users. In this case, practical solution is driving number of contributions - users get reasonable immediate reward - they getting their bookmarks organized.
• Users of Google+, Facebook and Twitter can benefit from interacting with others, being part of a community. Social reward is the driver behind most of the interactions. It took Facebook and Twitter, 4 and 5 years respectively to reach 100M active users globally, and Google+ crossed this milestone in just a year. This only shows the power behind social interaction. 
• Reputation is another strong contribution driver. Desire for public recognition is widely use by Wikipedia. They proofed that millions people working together can produce high quality articles and entries. 
• YouTube leverages self expression desire and it is on fire at the moment. 800M people are watching 4B hours a month on YouTube. Every minute there is over 72 hrs of video uploaded.
• Last but not least, altruism can also be a driver of contribution. People want the truth to be heard. If they get exceptional service in a good restaurant - they want to reward it by sharing their experience on Yelp! and recommend it to other people.  

Crowdsourcing, attention and productivity

There is a very interesting article by Huberman, Romeo and Wu (2009) exploring possible reasons why do people contribute and upload their videos on YouTube without any payment. It is said that people who behave rational would free ride on the production of others. Huberman et al. suggest that for contributors, videos are private goods – and the payment is attention.

A 2007 survey by McKinsey found that content creators’ desire for fame was their primary motivation for uploading videos. Other motivations cited were the desire to help others and to have fun. In terms of profiting from their videos, some users were open to the idea of compensation sharing, but that was not a primary driver.

Users of YouTube are contributors; they contribute and get attention and public recognition as a reward. As a result the productivity of the contributors depends on the number of views and/or downloads (the attention). The more views contributors received in one period, the more videos they uploaded during the following period. On the other hand lack of attention may lead to decrease in the number of the uploads.

What should YouTube do? Should they pay people for uploading their videos on their platform? In my opinion, the idea of monetary compensation, as suggested by the study of McKinsey, should not be followed by YouTube. According to Vohs, Mead and Goode (2008) the concept of money changes personal and interpersonal behavior (you can read more here: Impact of activating the concept money). People can start behaving like under monetary market rules, i.e. the individuals’ level of effort is influenced by the amount of compensation. Monetary markets are highly sensitive to the magnitude of compensation, whereas social markets are not. Under social market conditions, the effort is shaped by altruism and the amount of compensation is irrelevant.

Source: Cook, Scott. "The contribution revolution: Letting volunteers build your business." Harvard Business Review 86.10 (2008): 60-69.
Huberman, Bernardo A., Daniel M. Romero, and Fang Wu. "Crowdsourcing, attention and productivity." Journal of Information Science 35.6 (2009): 758-765.Vohs, Kathleen D., Nicole L. Mead, and Miranda R. Goode. "Merely activating the concept of money changes personal and interpersonal behavior." Current Directions in Psychological Science 17.3 (2008): 208-212.