Will Work for Praise: The Web's Free-Labor Economy

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As other visitors to the site found her gems, they gave them high marks, driving Sweet up in the site's contributor rankings. She was becoming a star—what Gould calls a maven. On a recent afternoon, she clicked on the site to check her status. "I'm No. 1 in San Francisco, No. 1 in Washington, No. 2 in Denver," she announced proudly.

The unwritten quid pro quo between Gould and Sweet amounts to a boilerplate contract for much of the free-labor economy. Gould provides a stage for Sweet to strut her stuff, a platform to reach millions of shopping fanatics around the world. This is the key to his business. It draws advertisers to targeted sites populated with shopping enthusiasts; ThisNext gets paid for each click. He's happy to give Sweet a boost by putting her in touch with media (including BusinessWeek). His team also sends mavens such freebies as skin cream and HaberVision sunglasses, which list at $200, Sweet notes. With this blend, Gould and other entrepreneurs manage to cash in on free labor—while glossing over the issue of financial remuneration.

Needed: A Handful of Black Swans

Making money is up to Sweet, who has a full-time job as a designer. She thinks that she might cash in on her stardom somewhere else—on blogs, books, TV, or even at a new job. (Her blog, http://ifitshipitshere.blogspot.com, gets tens of thousands of hits per week but has yet to make much money.)

As far as Gould is concerned, Sweet is a freak, statistically speaking—and just the kind of freak he was banking on. Gould, who studies network theory, believes much of the free-labor economy would crash and burn if it relied on average people to handle the work. He's looking instead for what the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls Black Swans—statistical anomalies. In his view, a mere handful of people rise to the top through a combination of smarts, good timing, and hard work.

This elite is then thrust into superstardom by the links and recommendations of a large network. The select soar in the rankings, which leads them to produce ever more free product. As a result, fewer than 1,000 of the millions of visitors to ThisNext contribute the lion's share of the work. (In graphic representations of this phenomenon, which is called the Power Law, they form the tiny head. Everyone else settles into what statisticians call "the long tail.") The superstars are the mavens, and Gould owes his success to them.

Always a Surplus of Free Labor

Like most free-labor companies, ThisNext has a paid staff to keep the mavens happy. The employees' job is to encourage, cajole, and direct the site's elite contributors. Staffers are also responsible for policing the site. But in the most successful free-labor companies, the paid staff takes it one step further: They enlist volunteer laborers akin to a posse of sheriff's deputies to take over their jobs, too. The message is that volunteers aren't just workers. They can run the place.

These days, Sweet has begun to wonder about payment, the real kind. Gould has called her and picked her brain, she says, asking her questions that she usually gets a "day rate" to answer. "I figure," she adds, "that he at least owes me a sandwich one of these days."

But Gould, who tends to view his labor force statistically, has a theory. He thinks his superstars rise from the pack and then—with time—fall. Maybe they get tired or bored, or others get bored by them. In any case, mavens tend to revert to the mean. This means that one day Sweet will tumble down those charts in San Francisco, Washington, and Denver. Her reign can't last forever. The trick in the volunteer economy is less to keep a superstar from quitting than to make sure that plenty of eager volunteers are ready to work to take her place.

Baker is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York.