The amount of traffic Youtube gets every second is ridiculous. Just to show you how ridiculous it is, please visit this link http://onesecond.designly.com/. This is a website called "Every Second on the Internet" and it shows you how much activity occurs on the internet every second such as google searches, facebook likes, or youtube views. I was genuinely surprised to find that there are more youtube videos viewed every second than google searches made. There is enormous power in that amount of people. The website also shows you how many of each item has been made since you have been on the website. I had been on the website for around 300 seconds now, or about five minutes, and more than 14 million youtube videos have been viewed. That is an insanely large amount of people, about one twentieth of all the people in the United States had watched a Youtube video in that time period.
Something in my mind connected this with another website my AP Biology teacher Mr. Horton had told me about. It was a website that researchers posted polypeptide chains to a public forum and then regular individuals such as you or me would spend the time figuring out how it folded into proteins. The scientists benefited from the large amounts of free effort and individuals benefited from feeling as though they had contributed to the forward advance of science, and they had. This kind of work is called crowdsourcing, in which a professional or a group will post work that is too large or menial to be done by professionals, and instead relies on normal citizens. Imagine it as a form of online volunteering. There are many other examples of this online such as scallop counting for scientific research, the game spore which relies on user-made creations to generate it's characters, and even a documentary titled "The American Revolution" which was created based on the contributions of individuals.
I think I made this subconscious connection in my head because I realized that the large amount of traffic on Youtube means it inherently has a great croudsourcing potential. How has there not been any sort of Youtube croudsourcing. There has been quite a bit of Youtube charities in which they simply ask their followers to donate to a charity, but I think Youtube would be more effective if they used croudsourcing. The reason why croudsourcing is more effective than charity is because people enjoy being active participants. I would call for Youtube personalities to call for people to contribute to specific croudsourcing activities as a livestream in which the Youtube personality would contribute as well for a period of time. Youtube could even implement croudsourcing through the comments section to report for scientific research or ask questions before videos. The possibility for croudsourcing is endless.
Just as a short reminder, the number of Youtube videos watched at this point on the website is 158 million.
Protein Croudsourcing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit
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