CrowdFlower Heads Downmarket With New Photo Moderation Tools
CrowdFlower, the crowdsourcing platform, is striking out in a new direction under the leadership of co-founder Lukas Biewald, who recently took back the CEO role from a hired executive.
Crowdflower went through its own image moderation tool to find inoffensive images for this sample screenshot.
CrowdFlower traditionally charges customers at least $10,000 per month to do little tasks on a big scale — like fill out their e-commerce product listings or catalog online media content. Its customers include eBay, Microsoft and Toshiba.
Now, a new CrowdFlower self-serve photo moderation tool will screen image uploads for objectionable content, starting at $100 per month. Each image will be screened by three to 10 people (the photos that moderators disagree about get put back into the system), with results delivered in a few minutes.
The so-called “Real Time Foto Moderator” is already being used by the flirting app Skout, and existing customers will be moved to the lower pricing.
“I retook the CEO job because I had a new idea for the company,” Biewald told me. “It always bothered me that we served only the biggest customers.”
CrowdFlower already moderates photo uploads for user-generated content sites, at a rate of three million photos per month. The photo moderation tool is just the first self-serve CrowdFlower application, with others planned, Biewald said, adding that looking for objectionable images is “not our most common task — but the simplest and easiest to explain.”
