The gig economy is depressing. Crowdtap is worse.
About 8 percent of U.S. adults earn money by doing contract work through so-called “gig economy” employers like Uber, Favor, or Amazon Mechanical Turk, according to the Pew Research Center; if the trend continues, one-third of Americans will support themselves this way by 2027.
The gig economy is growing rapidly, but it’s also changing how we think about what it means to work. Uber and other online platforms are making the case for a future in which work happens in little on-demand bursts — you need a ride, and someone appears to give you that ride. Instead of a salary and benefits like health insurance, the worker gets paid only for the time they’re actually driving you around.
I’m a researcher who studies how people work and I have a hard time endorsing this vision of the future. When I see Favor delivery drivers waiting to pick up a to-go order, I imagine a future in which half of us stand in line while the other half sit on couches. And then I imagine a future in which all these mundane tasks are automated: the cars drive themselves, the burritos fly in our windows on drones. And I wonder how companies are going to make money when there are no jobs and we can’t afford to buy a burrito or pay for a ride home from the bar.
To understand the answer to that question, you have to scrape the very bottom of the barrel of gig work. You have to go so far down that you don’t even call it work anymore. You have to go to Crowdtap.
Crowdtap pitches itself as a place where anyone can “team up” with their “favorite brands” and “get rewarded for your opinions” by completing “missions,” such as filling out surveys and posting product promotions to social media. These actions earn points that can be traded in for gift cards.
Along the way, you might also get a few free samples or coupons. There are also occasional contests where members can win additional gift cards or larger prizes. A lot of what Crowdtappers do is post brand promotions to social media. As I’m writing this, for example, I’m looking at someone who has tweeted, in the last ten minutes, about Febreze (“Would totally use Febreze to fight persistent odors in my basement”), squeezable apple sauce (“Great deal, just in time for the new school year!”), Splenda (three times), cheese snacks, LensCrafters (twice), Suave (twice), and McDonalds.
A cynical view of Crowdtap is that it’s just another form of social media marketing — people being paid to tell their friends to buy things. But then you realize that these people don’t have large social media followings (in fact, Crowdtap users I interviewed said they create throwaway social media accounts to use exclusively for Crowdtap). And sharing content on social media isn’t even required — the default option is to share, but you get your points either way. Crowdtap passes members’ responses on to brands, but otherwise nobody is listening to what they say. No one is responding. There’s very little about this that might be called social. Imagine someone wandering alone in a giant desert, shouting “I love Big Macs!” into the sky. That’s Crowdtap.
So here’s an even more cynical view: Crowdtap isn’t social media marketing. Instead, it’s a form of work that rewards people for selling products to themselves. And if we imagine a future in which more people work in the gig economy, in which income inequality continues to increase, and in which brands need new ways to stimulate consumption, it might give some hints about what’s coming after Uber.
In the summer of 2016, I interviewed twelve people who use Crowdtap and similar online platforms. I compensated the interviewees, as is standard in academia, in order to get a more diverse sample and also because it seemed like the ethical thing to do given the fact that they could have spent that time Crowdtapping. I offered $5 Amazon gift cards and explained that the interview was for labor research. In exchange, I asked them what their lives are like and why they do what they do.
The people I talked to generally don’t have standard jobs. Seven referred to themselves as stay-at-home moms. Two are retired. One described herself as disabled, and two told me they have disabled children. Two said that they rarely leave the house, and several others described similarly isolating daily routines. Almost all of them said, unprompted, that they use the gift cards they earn to buy Christmas presents for family members. But they talk about the free products they receive, too, which Crowdtap sends them in order to complete tasks — how helpful it is to get shampoo, pain killers, tampons, or dog food, for the small price of answering surveys about their mustard purchase habits or commenting on an Instagram photo of a redesigned Splenda bottle.
One of the dark sides of Crowdtap and similar platforms is how little participants end up making. Crowdtap doesn’t advertise itself as a kind of work (although its Membership Agreement makes clear that participants are classified as independent contractors), and members typically don’t see Crowdtap as an employer, either. But people I talked to said they spend an average of 15 hours a week on these platforms, and, when I asked how much they end up making based on the value of the free products, coupons, and gift cards, the answers ranged from 25 cents an hour to about $11, with an average of $2.45.
But beyond the far-below-minimum-wage payments, the more insidious side of this kind of work is that it masquerades as something it’s not. Crowdtap says it’s about letting people share their opinions with brands and with other consumers, but the flow of information actually goes the other way. Crowdtap isn’t about letting people speak to brands; it’s about letting brands speak to people.
I didn’t fully understand this until I decided to spend an afternoon using Crowdtap. During that time, here’s what I did:
Regardless of whether we call it work or “connecting with brands,” these repetitive tasks are a pretty intense form of consumer education. And when you repeat these activities hour after hour, spending enough time to actually earn a $5 gift card, you probably pick up some habits that brands are happy about. Such as:
Good consumers keep their personal electronics up to date. And they eat lobster (or at least aspire to).
by Daniel Carter, The Outline | Read more:
Image: Rune Fisker
About 8 percent of U.S. adults earn money by doing contract work through so-called “gig economy” employers like Uber, Favor, or Amazon Mechanical Turk, according to the Pew Research Center; if the trend continues, one-third of Americans will support themselves this way by 2027.
The gig economy is growing rapidly, but it’s also changing how we think about what it means to work. Uber and other online platforms are making the case for a future in which work happens in little on-demand bursts — you need a ride, and someone appears to give you that ride. Instead of a salary and benefits like health insurance, the worker gets paid only for the time they’re actually driving you around.
I’m a researcher who studies how people work and I have a hard time endorsing this vision of the future. When I see Favor delivery drivers waiting to pick up a to-go order, I imagine a future in which half of us stand in line while the other half sit on couches. And then I imagine a future in which all these mundane tasks are automated: the cars drive themselves, the burritos fly in our windows on drones. And I wonder how companies are going to make money when there are no jobs and we can’t afford to buy a burrito or pay for a ride home from the bar.
To understand the answer to that question, you have to scrape the very bottom of the barrel of gig work. You have to go so far down that you don’t even call it work anymore. You have to go to Crowdtap.
Crowdtap pitches itself as a place where anyone can “team up” with their “favorite brands” and “get rewarded for your opinions” by completing “missions,” such as filling out surveys and posting product promotions to social media. These actions earn points that can be traded in for gift cards.Along the way, you might also get a few free samples or coupons. There are also occasional contests where members can win additional gift cards or larger prizes. A lot of what Crowdtappers do is post brand promotions to social media. As I’m writing this, for example, I’m looking at someone who has tweeted, in the last ten minutes, about Febreze (“Would totally use Febreze to fight persistent odors in my basement”), squeezable apple sauce (“Great deal, just in time for the new school year!”), Splenda (three times), cheese snacks, LensCrafters (twice), Suave (twice), and McDonalds.
A cynical view of Crowdtap is that it’s just another form of social media marketing — people being paid to tell their friends to buy things. But then you realize that these people don’t have large social media followings (in fact, Crowdtap users I interviewed said they create throwaway social media accounts to use exclusively for Crowdtap). And sharing content on social media isn’t even required — the default option is to share, but you get your points either way. Crowdtap passes members’ responses on to brands, but otherwise nobody is listening to what they say. No one is responding. There’s very little about this that might be called social. Imagine someone wandering alone in a giant desert, shouting “I love Big Macs!” into the sky. That’s Crowdtap.
So here’s an even more cynical view: Crowdtap isn’t social media marketing. Instead, it’s a form of work that rewards people for selling products to themselves. And if we imagine a future in which more people work in the gig economy, in which income inequality continues to increase, and in which brands need new ways to stimulate consumption, it might give some hints about what’s coming after Uber.
In the summer of 2016, I interviewed twelve people who use Crowdtap and similar online platforms. I compensated the interviewees, as is standard in academia, in order to get a more diverse sample and also because it seemed like the ethical thing to do given the fact that they could have spent that time Crowdtapping. I offered $5 Amazon gift cards and explained that the interview was for labor research. In exchange, I asked them what their lives are like and why they do what they do.
The people I talked to generally don’t have standard jobs. Seven referred to themselves as stay-at-home moms. Two are retired. One described herself as disabled, and two told me they have disabled children. Two said that they rarely leave the house, and several others described similarly isolating daily routines. Almost all of them said, unprompted, that they use the gift cards they earn to buy Christmas presents for family members. But they talk about the free products they receive, too, which Crowdtap sends them in order to complete tasks — how helpful it is to get shampoo, pain killers, tampons, or dog food, for the small price of answering surveys about their mustard purchase habits or commenting on an Instagram photo of a redesigned Splenda bottle.
One of the dark sides of Crowdtap and similar platforms is how little participants end up making. Crowdtap doesn’t advertise itself as a kind of work (although its Membership Agreement makes clear that participants are classified as independent contractors), and members typically don’t see Crowdtap as an employer, either. But people I talked to said they spend an average of 15 hours a week on these platforms, and, when I asked how much they end up making based on the value of the free products, coupons, and gift cards, the answers ranged from 25 cents an hour to about $11, with an average of $2.45.
But beyond the far-below-minimum-wage payments, the more insidious side of this kind of work is that it masquerades as something it’s not. Crowdtap says it’s about letting people share their opinions with brands and with other consumers, but the flow of information actually goes the other way. Crowdtap isn’t about letting people speak to brands; it’s about letting brands speak to people.
I didn’t fully understand this until I decided to spend an afternoon using Crowdtap. During that time, here’s what I did:
- Picked a list of my favorite brands.
- Answered questions such as “What are the benefits of aloe in a facial skin care product?”
- Visited pages that provided information about various cheese products.
- Filled in prompts about these cheese products such as “Think my fam will love ______.”
- Tweeted these responses, being sure to include hashtags such as #HorizonCrowd and links to product pages.
- Wrote a short response about why I was “hoping to try out a delicious variety” of cheese snacks. I was reminded to “mention both what kind of occasions you envision your family snacking … and which aspects of the snack pack appeal to you most.”
Regardless of whether we call it work or “connecting with brands,” these repetitive tasks are a pretty intense form of consumer education. And when you repeat these activities hour after hour, spending enough time to actually earn a $5 gift card, you probably pick up some habits that brands are happy about. Such as:
- Good consumers have favorite brands.
- Good consumers are knowledgeable about the products produced by those brands. Specifically, they can list features that make those products better than others.
- Good consumers think about buying and using products in the future, and they tell people about their plans.
- Good consumers include brand hashtags when they talk about products online.
Good consumers keep their personal electronics up to date. And they eat lobster (or at least aspire to).
by Daniel Carter, The Outline | Read more:
Image: Rune Fisker
