I recently read a very interesting blog post from Jared Cicon (a.k.a. Video Contest King) about participation in crowdsourcing. Jared is a pioneer participant in video contests; he was one of the finalists of the first Doritos contest in 2006, and has taken (and won) a lot of contests since then. In his blog post “You…against the rest of the freelance world“, Jared shares his point of view about the current video contest lanscape. In his blog post, he says how much more competitive it is now: “what I’m hoping to demonstrate […] is how difficult it can be to freelance in our video world, and that we are clearly facing ongoing increased competition with every passing week“. As a consequence, he says, brands’ expectations are getting higher and it is therefore more difficult to win contests and earn money.

While it is always tempting to do those things that feel more ‘artisitic’ and which are more personally fulfilling, they must be balanced with content that the brands can use and that ‘get the money to pay the bills’

The crux of his blog post is “Evolve or die” – much like in the Wild West. I invite you to read the great post that he wrote on his blog if you want to find out more. After reading his insightful post on his blog, I thought it would be great to talk about crowdsourcing “from the other side”. He nicely took the time to answer a couple of questions about himself, his activity as a producer and about crowdsourced video production in general, and it’s my pleasure to publish the interview here on the blog. Continue reading →