Could China eventually dominate service marketplaces and the crowdsourcing landscape?

By | January 13, 2012

Service marketplaces like oDesk and Elance have grown rapidly in the past few years and continue to do so.  In fact oDesk claims its contractors earned more than $225m in 2011 (with over a million projects created) whilst in 2010 the comparable figure was $115m.

In Chapter 13 of Getting Results from Crowds we cover and compare the main service marketplaces, while also listing some of the other platforms that are worth investigating.  One of the most interesting sites we mention is Witmart.com.

Witmart.com is actually an English language version of generalist Chinese service marketplace Zhubajie.com. It is mainly aimed at small businesses in the US. Over the two sites combined, it claims to have a colossal 5.9 million providers.  In terms of the volume of registered contractors, this may mean it is actually the largest of all the service marketplaces.

The sheer size of this talent pool may have been one of the reasons why IDG Capital Partners, a venture capital firm which specializes in investing in Chinese companies, have chosen to invest what’s been described as “tens of millions of dollars”.

What’s also interesting is that service marketplaces have alreeady been operating in China for a number of years. Although these sites have evolved quite separately, there are many parallels with their Western-based equivalents. Known as “Witkey” sites (an abbreviation for the “key of wisdom”) the sector is mature enough in China to have produced its own conference in late 2010.  Reports from the conference claimed there were over 100 Witkey site in China alone with over 20 million registered providers.  Established marketplaces include www.taskcn.com and K68.cn.

Overall Witkey sites have received surprisingly little attention so far in the Western media, although there has been some attention in crowdsourcing circles, initially because Alec Lynch, CEO at DesignCrowd, spoke at the Witkey conference.   More recently they got less favorable attention when an academic study suggested vast amounts of international spam and fake postings on social media sites were being generated from work placed on zhubajie.com.

With Witkey sites well established, ever closer links between Western businesses and China, more and more English being spoken in China and a huge talent pool available, it is possible that China may start to dominate service marketplaces over the coming years.  What do you think?  Have you had experience of using any of the Chinese Witkey sites? Do you think witmart.com will grow in popularity in 2012?

  • http://yannigroth.wordpress.com/ Yannig

    Thanks for sharing this! Creative crowdsourcing websites like eYeka (http://en.eyeka.com/) have already their Chinese version of the site, and winners of the contests increasingly come from China. This is definitely an attractive market… as soon as these websites are trustworthy!

    Researchers recently described another threat that they dubbed “Crowdturfing”, see here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.5654

    I can also think about other papers about Witkey sites, like:
    Yang, J., Adamic, L. A., & Ackerman, M. S. (2008). Competing to Share Expertise : the Taskcn Knowledge Sharing Community. International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) (pp. 1-8). Seattle. Retrieved from http://bibsi.cms.si.umich.edu/node/2
    Zheng, H., Li, D., & Hou, W. (2011). Task Design, Motivation, and Participation in Crowdsourcing Contests. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 15(4), 57-88.

    What do you think?