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Warning: this assignment is out of date. It may still need to be updated for this year's class. Check with your instructor before you start working on this assignment.
This assignment has multiple deliverables. The writeup is due before 11:59PM on Thursday, February 11, 2021. The video is due before 11:59PM on Thursday, February 18, 2021.

Market Research : Assignment 2

This week we will be looking at the wealth of companies and projects that use crowdsourcing as part of their business. Here’s a list of companies and projects that you could research:

  • 5 Calls: A platform that allows individuals to call member of congresses regarding specific issues.
  • 99Designs: A freelancer platform for connecting graphic designer and clients.
  • Airbnb: Hosts  provide  lodging accommodations for others; the personal relationship hosts have with their lodge allows for creative accommodations.
  • Apple HealthKit/ResearchKit: build apps to enroll participants and conduct studies at scale.
  • Benefunder: Benefunder is a crowdfunding platform for funding research in a variety of fields.
  • Change.org: A platform where users can create and prompt petitions.
  • Citizens and Technology Lab: A public-interest research group at Cornell focusing on researching and studying the effects of technology on society. 
  • Clickworker: A platform that connects independent contractors called “Clickworkers” with a variety of projects for clients.
  • CloudFactory: Offers human-powered data processing for AI and automation businesses.
  • Couchsurfing: Connects travelers with locals for short-term stays.
  • Coursera: Offers massive open online courses, specializations, degrees, professional and mastertrack courses.
  • CrowdAI.org: Crowdsourcing platform focusing on real-world problems solvable by AI.
  • CrowdMed: is a healthcare crowdsourcing platform that uses a medical case-solving community to try to identify illnesses that doctors have been unable to diagnose.
  • Crowds On Demand: Provides people and materials for clients interested in creating protests, rallies, mobs, or other PR events.
  • Daemo: A self-governed crowdsourcing marketplace.
  • Dataturks: A platform that offers specific label annotation for Machine Learning tasks.
  • Defined Crowd: Provides data sets to train artificially intelligent speech programs.
  • Duolingo: App to teach people new languages. 
  • EatWith: Provides online cooking classes from chef hosts live streamed from their kitchen.
  • eBay buyer/seller ratings: Users provide feedback scores for merchants which then affects their ratings.
  • edX: Sourcing professors from all over the world to teach free courses online.
  • EyeWire A game which allows players to help mapping real retinal neurons from Princeton.
  • Field Agent: Provides clients with information regarding store audits, shopper insights, ratings, and reviews from real users.
  • Figure Eight (now Appen) Provide various AI services like data annotation, smart labelling etc.
  • Flattr - Support creators with one-time/recurring subscriptions
  • Freelancer : A platform that facilitates the listing and hiring of freelancers.
  • Genius: Annotate the meaning behind music/rap lyrics, mostly user contributions, with some interaction between the artists themselves and the community.
  • GoFundMe: Crowdfunding for widely varying, user-submitted causes.
  • Good Judgment Open: Focuses on crowdsourcing forecasting of political, economic and technological events.
  • Google Crowdsource app: Help label data for Google’s AI products.
  • Iceland’s Crowdsourced Constitution: Has been passed as a basis for a new constitution in Iceland. Written by a commission of 25 people with all citizens of Iceland allowed to comment on the drafts and propose their own modifications. 
  • The iLabour Project: A blog that investigates the construction of Labour Markets, Institutions and Movements on the Internet
  • IndieGoGo: Crowdfunding platform similar to Kickstarter for raising money for startups and charity projects. 
  • Innocentive: Crowdsourcing platform that connects individuals with a variety of tasks related to business, data, and AI
  • Instacart: UberEats for groceries. Order groceries from nearby stores and a shopper will pick up and deliver them to your door. 
  • Invisible Boyfriend: Invisible Boyfriend gives you social proof of being in a relationship so you can get back to living life on your own terms.
  • iStockPhoto: A media exchange platform that enables users to sell and purchase rights to different stock photos, videos, and artworks.
  • Jovoto: Crowdsourcing marketing plans using experts in marketing. 
  • Kaggle: Kaggle allows users to find and publish data sets, explore and build models in a web-based data-science environment, work with other data scientists and machine learning engineers, and enter competitions to solve data science challenges.
  • Kickstarter Funding for startups and entrepreneurial pursuits (Ashley)
  • Kiva: Connect lenders to micro loan borrowers in developing countries
  • LeadGenius - Generate leads for B2B Sales
  • Lending Club - Connects lenders with borrowers on a ad-hoc marketplace.
  • Lyft: Develops, markets, and operates a mobile app, offering vehicles for hire, motorized scooters, a bicycle-sharing system, and food delivery.
  • Microworkers: Microtask site for small jobs like labeling data.
  • Mighty AI: Startup acquired by Uber for automatic labelling of incoming data from autonomous vehicles. 
  • Netflix prize: A historical example of an innovation prize.  Netflix held a competition for researchers to develop an improved movie recommendation system and offered a million dollar prize for the best system. 
  • OpenStreetMap: An open source, free map that is maintained by localized mapping community.
  • Orchestra: Orchestrate teams of experts with Robotic Process Automation.
  • PatientsLikeMe - Find other patients experiencing the same chronic illness as you do.
  • Patreon: A crowdfunding platform that helps creators and artists earn a monthly income from their subscribers in return for providing rewards and perks.
  • Polis: Real-time crowdsourcing for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think.
  • Postmates: Similar to UberEats you can order food from restaurants and a person will pick up and deliver it to you. 
  • PredictIt: Online marketplace for trading penny shares of events like whether 2021 will be the hottest year on record or who will win an election. 
  • PredictWise: a website that makes predictions on politics, sports, finance, and more
  • Premise: Gather market intelligence data from customers
  • Prolific: Supports online research by giving researchers access to participants for their studies
  • PublicStuff: Offers local governments citizen engagement apps and websites to extend access to city services 
  • Quora: A question and answer website that allows people to post and answer questions about a wide variety of topics 
  • Qualtrics: Survey software for gathering data on a product for businesses.
  • Robinhood: Allows layman investors like everyday people to buy stocks directly without having to go through a broker.
  • Samasource: A training data platform that works with companies to develop ML models.
  • Scale - Get labelled AI data for Self-Driving Cars, Transcription, OCR, etc.
  • Scistarter: Contribute to gathering data for various science research projects.
  • Sunshine (Ashley) This smart watch application uses mobile data to collect local weather data.
  • TaskRabbit: same-day service platform instantly connects you with skilled Taskers to help with cleaning, furniture assembly, home repairs, running errands and more.
  • Threadless: “How it Works” - Artists from around the world submit designs, the Threadless community scores each design and the best of the best are printed and sold. New designs are chosen for print every week and the winning artists can profit handsomely for their designs, and in some cases, also take home big cash prizes from special themed design challenges.
  • Topcoder: Accessing amazing technology talent, like unleashing the gig economy… a project manager to shepard you through your projects
  • TurkOpticon: Forum for Mechanical Turk workers to share reviews and see statistics of requesters for attributes like their fairness, generosity, and timeliness. 
  • TurkPrime CloudResearch, formerly TurkPrime, is the leading participant-sourcing platform for online research and surveys. Our tools provide academic and market researchers immediate access to millions of diverse, high-quality respondents around the world.
  • TurkServer Enabling Synchronous and Longitudinal Online Experiments…We see synchronous and longitudinal experiments involving real-time interaction between participants as a dual-use paradigm for both human computation and social science, and present TurkServer, a platform that facilitates these types of experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our work has the potential to make more fruitful online experiments accessible to researchers in many different fields.
  • Uber A gig economy business known for ride hailing services.
  • Upwork connects businesses to specialized workers for associated needs.
  • Ushahidi: A platform first developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election violence in 2008.
  • vTaiwan: Taiwan’s exploratory system online allowing citizens to crowdsource laws
  • Waze: Provides directions and route changes based on driver reports of traffic and accidents. You can also see recent gas prices for nearby stations among other features. (Eddie)
  • Wikipedia’s AI helper: Article on how Wikipedia uses AI for quality management of its crowdsourced content creation.
  • XPRIZE: Prizes to solve large moonshot problems for society
  • Yelp: a platform for users to post reviews and information about local restaurants and businesses, as well as these businesses to interact with their customers (Bryan)
  • Zensors: An AI solution service for office buildings, college campuses, retail shops, etc to leverage the power of computer vision and sensing to improve their businesses.
  • Zooniverse: This website allows interested members of the public to contribute to specialized research, producing results that have been found in relevant papers.

This assignment has two deliverables:

  1. Answering the Homework 2 questionnaire on Gradescope about the company or project that you are researching. This is due before 11:59PM on Thursday, February 11, 2021. If you are working with a partner, only one of you needs to submit the questionnaire. Please save your survey answers in a file on your own computer, so that you can have a copy to use for your presentation.
  2. A presentation, optionally a video, about the company. Several of the best videos will be selected for in-class presentations. Teams whose videos are selected will receive extra credit. This is due before 11:59PM on Thursday, February 18, 2021. You can submit a link to your video on the Gradescope presentation form.

This assignment can be done in pairs.

Part 1: Researching a Company

First, please sign up for a company or project. Up to two teams can sign up for a company. If two teams have already signed up for a company that you’re interested in then please pick a different company. If there’s a company that you’d like to research that isn’t on the list, you are welcome to ask the instructor or the TA to ask if it is OK. Please post your request to Piazza.

Next, please read the academic paper Human Computation: A Survey and Taxonomy of a Growing Field. The paper introduces several dimensions that we’ll use to categorize the companies that you’ll be doing research – dimensions like motivation, quality control, aggregation, and so on. We will ask you to write a short summary of the paper.

You and your partner should research the company together, and then fill in your answers about it in the Homework 2 questionnaire on Gradescope. Your short answers to these questions on Thursday, February 11, 2021. Remember to save your survey answers on your own computer, so that you can have a copy to use when you do your video profile.

Questionnaire

Below are the questions that you will be asked to answer about the company or project that you are profiling. Please upload a PDF with your answers to Gradescope.

  1. Please give a summary of the academic paper Human Computation: A Survey and Taxonomy of a Growing Field, and how it relates to this assignment.
  2. What company are you profiling?
  3. What online resources did you use in researching it? Include URLs.
  4. Did you use any other resources? Did you conduct any interviews, did you try the company’s service?
  5. Give a one sentence description of the company. Be sure to use the name of the company in your sentence.
  6. Give a URL for the company’s website
  7. Give a URL for the company’s logo
  8. When was the company started?
  9. Who were the founders?
  10. Does it have an interesting origin story?
  11. What kind of organization is it?
    • Publicly traded company
    • Privately held company
    • Non-profit organization
    • Other
  12. If the company type is none of the above, please specify.
  13. What service does the company provide?
  14. Does this update a previous service or business model, or is it completely new?
  15. If it updates something, what does it replace?
  16. What other new companies provide services that are similar to your company’s?
  17. What is an example of how someone uses this service? What sort of people use the service? If this is a service that you have used, then describe your experience.
  18. Compare the number of users to contributors.
    • More users than contributors
    • More contributors than users
    • Roughly equal numbers
  19. Who are the people who contribute services?
  20. How does the company incentivize them to contribute, or what motivates them to participate?
  21. Is this a service that was previously provided by experts / professionals?
  22. Are the contributors experts / professionals?
  23. How does the company generate revenue?
  24. How does the company ensure the quality of the services it provides?
  25. Is its service something that is typically regulated by the government?
  26. If so, what are the intents of the regulations and does your company meet those standards?
  27. Is a reputation system used by your company?
  28. If so, how does it work?
  29. If the service is provided by many contributors, how are are their contributions aggregated?
  30. Describe the workflow for how the service is advertised, and how the contributors contribute, and what the users get in the end.
  31. What is the scale of the services that your company provides, in terms of users?
  32. What is the scale of the services that your company provides, in terms of dollars?
  33. If your company were to scale up to 10 or 100 times its current size, how well do you think its business model would work? How well would the incentive scheme scale? How about the quality/aggregation model?
  34. Have there been any controversies about the company or the service that it provides?
  35. Is there anything else you’d like to say about the company?

Part 2: Creating a Video

You will prepare a short presentation in the form a 5 to 7 minute video presentation about your company. Your presentation should address the following questions:

  • What incentives does it offer to get people to participate?
  • How does it aggregate the information provided by the crowd?
  • What are the quality concerns, and how does the company do quality control?
  • How does the company benefit from user contributions?
  • Are there any controversies about the company?

Your presentation is due on Thursday, February 18, 2021. To turn in your video, please upload it to Vimeo. Give us the link to your presentation or video using the Homework 2 presentation form. Make sure that your video is publicly viewable or that you give us a password to view it on the web form.

Here are instructions on how to sign up for Vimeo:

Instructions for uploading your video to Vimeo

  1. Go to Vimeo.
  2. Create an account by clicking the enormous blue “JOIN” button.
  3. You will receive and email with a link to verify your account. You have to verify before you can upload videos.
  4. Once you are signed in, click “Upload” at the top of the page.
  5. Click the “Choose a Video to Upload” button and choose your video
  6. Once it is uploading, you can change the privacy settings. If you are soon to be on the job market, be careful. You probably don’t want potential employers to know how intelligently and elegantly you are able to analyze and present on the potential market value of technology companies, so maybe don’t use your real name.
  7. That’s it! Fill in the title and tags and what-have-you in the survey to tell us where to find it.

FAQ

  • What is the difference between Users and Contributors?

    Many of you seemed confused about what constitutes a user vs. a contributor. In many crowdsourcing companies, this line is blurry- or nonexistent! Many companies you looked at fit what can be thought of as a “data-mining” model (e.g. Yelp, Foursquare), in which the primary service being provided depends on using data and modeling observed patterns of behavior– e.g. to target ads or to recommend products. In these cases, the users are the contributors– everyone who participates provides data, and everyone uses everyone else’s data. This is an awesome crowdsourcing model because it is (ideally) self-sustaining and self-incentivizing. The more a person contributes (by providing more data about themselves), the better product they receive (e.g. better recommendations).

  • How does my company do Aggregation?

    Many of the companies we look at fit into the “match-making” or “marketplace” model (e.g. Uber, Airbnb, Etsy). This is a very common case in which the company is simply working to match supply with demand, where the suppliers (e.g. drivers, in the case of Uber) and the consumers (riders) are distributed all over, and may have trouble finding one another otherwise. Here, rating systems etc. are one piece of the platform that might require aggregating, but arguably the more interesting aggregation problem is how to match a supplier with a consumer. Is this through preference-based recommendation systems (as in the data-mining model discussed above), through location-based matching, through bidding/price? Making these matches is non-trival, but crucial to making the company function.

  • Does this update a previous service or business model, or is it completely new?

    For this question, more than a third of you said “completely new.” Try to think broadly when you are considering where these crowdsourcing companies fit into the economy as a whole. (Think Silicon Valley’s favorite buzzword: “disruption.”) Most of these services being provided are not completely new, but they are directly competing with a service that was traditionally supplied by a brick-and-mortar company in a more centralized manner. Uber competes with taxi companies, Airbnb with hotel chains, Coursera with higher education universities. This is part of what makes crowdsourcing so exciting!

  • Is getting venture capital funding is a business model?

    No. Smart investors don’t invest in a company who says their plan for generating revenue is to “get money from investors.” When in doubt about the company’s business plan, it is probably “ads”. :-)

  • How to make a group submission on Gradescope?

    One group member can submit answers just as you do in previous homeworks. Then at the submitted page where you could see all your answers and points distribution, there is an option on the top right for you to edit group member. You can add your partner there with his or her Gradescope Id inside this course. Both of you with share the same submission and get the same grading. The submission is required to be made by only one team member.

Grading Rubric

The written survey is worth approximately 10% of your overall grade in the course. Please answer the survey questions thoughtfully. Extra credit would worth approximately 5% of the overall grade in the course.

Examples profiles from last year

Shapeways is a 3D printing service and marketplace
Video profile: http://player.vimeo.com/video/154886545?password=nets213"
Who were the founders? Peter Weijmarshausen, Robert Schouwenburg and Marleen Vogelaar
When was it started? Company was started in 2007-2008 in the Netherlands
Does it have any interesting origin story? It started as a spinoff from Royal Philips Electronics in the Netherlands in 2007.
What services does Shapeways provide? Shapeways provides a 3D printing service in many materials and finishes. Anyone can upload a 3D model to the website and someone may order to print that object. Users can also sell those designs and find designers to collaborate with to create products. Shapeways will print those objects for a fee on top of the price they set. Recently they have partnered with businesses offering 3D scanning services in order to make 3D scanning technology accessible to their customers. They also offer tutorials and tools to help customers design 3D models.
Who uses the services? A Jewelry designer who uploads my models on Shapeways' marketplace. People can buy his/her designs in different printed materials and he/she can charge any price for a design. For each sale he/she makes his/her listed price minus the quoted print cost from Shapeways.

Designers and entrepreneurs design and sell products while anyone interested in non mass-manufactured products buy from the marketplace. These tend to be products that are not yet offered by any online retailer and solve a very specific issue for the user.


Who are the people who contribute the services? Designers or entrepreneurs who want to sell a few of their designs or create their own shop online. Shapeways helps them test those and check if there is demand for them.


How does Shapeways incentivize them to contribute, or what is their motivation? Creators are incentivised by getting paid when others purchase their printed designs.


Is this a service that was previously provided by experts? Yes.
Are the contributors experts/professionals? No.
How does Shapeways ensure the quality of the services it provides? The 3D printing process they use is very thorough. They use expensive and modern machines to print those objects and the people they hire ensure that the quality of the products is exceptional.


Compare the number of users to contributors: More users than contributors
If its service is provided by many contributors, how are their contributions aggregated? The marketplace is sorted conveniently into categories such as Gadgets, Accessories, Jewlery etc and contributors set up shops which group their items in. As a user, you can browse those shops for goods from the same designer.


Describe the workflow for how the service is advertised, how the contributors contribute, and what the users get in the end: (1) Designer uploads a 3D model to the website. (2) Random user is interested and buys the product (3) Shapeways prints the object in one of their factories (4) Shapeways ships the product to the buyer (5) Designer and Shapeways gets some money and the user all the fun!


What is the scale of Shapeways in terms of users? In 2015, the company had 500,000 "shapies", which are the contributors of 3D model designs.
What is the scale of Shapeways in terms of dollars? Since it's privately held, there is no data on revenues/profits. But the company has received $76.3 million in funding since it started in 2008.
If Shapeways were to scale up to 10-100 times its current size, how well do you think would its business model would work? If Shapeways were to scale up by a significant percentage it would have to expand its 3D printing facilities accordingly, as well as labor. It could potentially move printing to China or India where costs are lower.

The incentive scheme would still work, because it would mean that there would be more buyers and, therefore, more money for the sellers. Quality may decrease, but they could potentially offer different printing qualities.


What kind of organization is it? Privately held company
How does Shapeways generate revenue? Shapeways generates revenue through production fees from items that they print.


Estimize crowdsources equity earnings estimates and macroeconomic indicators to produce a data set that is more accurate than Wall Street's estimates in over 70% of occasions.
Video profile: http://player.vimeo.com/video/154945640?password=welcome"
Who were the founders? Leigh Drogen
When was it started? 2011
Does it have any interesting origin story? Leigh Drogen was previously an analyst at a quantitative hedge fund that used many strategies around earnings events. Every quarter, Leigh would see the same thing - companies would beat their earnings estimates given by Wall Street almost 100% of the time. Upon further inspection, he saw that Wall Street analysts are incentivized to low ball their estimates for companies due to the relationships that they have, and he saw the opportunity to make the estimates a more fair representation of what will truly happen. He quit his job at the hedge fund and started Estimize, with the drive to make estimates more democratic and transparent for everyone.
What services does Estimize provide? Estimize provides multiple services through earnings estimates. The first is the sheer raw data of estimates. Estimize collects estimates for earnings per share (EPS) and revenue for nearly every US Exchange listed company. The raw data that the company collects comes from individuals who sign up for the company's website. These individuals can be professionals, students, independent investors, research analysts, etc. Then, Estimize generates a consensus, which is an average of every valid estimate, into one singular number. To sell the data, Estimize provides 3 spreadsheets- the first includes a list of every user on estimize along with their biographical data, the second includes every estimate that has been made on the website, and the third includes every release, or every earnings event that has occured, with both the estimize consensus for EPS and revenue, as well as the Wall Street estimates.

The second main service that Estimize provides is a stock screener. On this screener, individuals are able to screen US listed stocks for specific analytics in their earnings estimates. They are able to search for analytics such as % of the time Estimize is more accurate than the Wall Street consensus, or % of the time company beats Estimize consensus. This stock screener is unlike any other stock screener already available, because no other data sets exist like Estimize's, so it is novel.


If this updates a previous service or business model, what does it replace? The previous model Estimize replaces is Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S estimates. These estimates typically come from 20-30 of the same research analysts at investment banks that make estimates on the companies time and time again. The Estimize data set draws from a broader representation of the population, by polling individuals who are both directly involved in financial markets and those who are not.


Who uses the services? Hedge funds that use quantitative strategies to trade will use the Estimize data. The Estimize data contains more accurate representations of what the market is expecting, so hedge funds will be able to make more accurate trades and generate larger alpha than they will with data from Thomson Reuters. Whether this results in them engaging in post-earnings trading strategies, pre-earnings strategies, or even holding through earnings announcements, the data has been academically proven to produce alpha and create returns.
Who are the people who contribute the services? The people who contribute are any individuals who sign up for the website to submit estimates. These people can range from hedge fund managers, to research analysts at investments, to students, to academics, to even professionals that are not in the field in finance. Anyone is eligible to sign up and contribute, and the biographies of those who contribute is very diverse.
How does Estimize incentivize them to contribute, or what is their motivation? The data set is blind to any individual who does not contribute. That is, if you do not contribute, you will not be able to see the estimates for any given stock. The company also incentivizes individuals to contribute by giving an assessment of the individual's history, and providing a track record for individual analysts to show to employers, clients, etc. Finally, there is a leagues feature (think Fantasy football, except for estimates), in which individuals are able to win prizes (super bowl tickets, gift cards, etc.) if they are the most accurate in the league.

Despite all of these incentives, when polled, the contributors cited wanting to build a more accurate data set as the
Is this a service that was previously provided by experts? Yes.
Are the contributors experts/professionals? Yes.
How does Estimize ensure the quality of the services it provides? Estimize runs many algorithms on the front end of its website in order to ensure the quality of its data. The first is a general algorithm that compares any individual's estimate to the Estimize consensus for that estimate. If any person's estimate is plus or minus 2 standard deviations from the estimate, that person's estimate will automatically be flagged and removed from the system.

Secondly, Estimize runs many more complex algorithms to further ensure the quality of its data. Estimize runs algorithms that detect various details, such as the amount of time spent on the website before making the estimate, how accurate the user has been on the past, what other parts of Estimize has the user recently clicked to before submitting this estimate, did the user only change the default estimate by a little before submitting, etc. All of this results in a simple boolean, true or false, as to whether the estimate was flagged. An analysis of their data shows that nearly 1 in 10,000 estimates needs to be flagged, so users typically do not submit false estimates. Of those that are reported, nearly 999/1000 are due to mechanical errors by humans - someone submits $15 instead of $1.50 for earnings per share. Barely any estimates are truly submitted with the intent of gaming the system.
If Estimize uses a reputation system, how does it work? Users are rated on the accuracy of their estimate for every estimate that they submit. They get a certain amount of either positive or negative points, for EPS and revenue, for every submission. This, along with the number of estimates the user has submitted, are turned into a Confidence level 1-10, that is displayed on the user's profile to show how accurate they are. As you make more estimates that are accurate, your confidence level goes up. If your estimates are consistently inaccurate, then your confidence level will go down.
Compare the number of users to contributors: More contributors than users
If its service is provided by many contributors, how are their contributions aggregated? The users contributions are aggregated through the backend of the website. Users submit estimates through the front end, and an algorithm runs on the backend to calculate the simple average of every individual's estimate. Recently (~ 2 weeks ago), the company released a new consensus, called the Estimize select consensus. This consensus weights individuals' estimates based off of how accurate they have been in the past. This is an extra fee on top of the base data, and it has been shown to be more accurate than Wall Street 80% of the time (as opposed to the usual 70% for Estimize).

Graphs display individuals' estimates on the website, along with a list that shows every estimate made.
Describe the workflow for how the service is advertised, how the contributors contribute, and what the users get in the end: 1) The service is not advertised for directly. Advertisements occur through media appearances by company executives, and through word of mouth in the financial industry

2) Users contribute (as said above) through the front end of the website, or through software that directly hooks to their financial terminal (although this is about 2% of users).

3) Users get to see what the Estimize consensus is for any given stock, along with being able to build a track record for their history. They are also able to win prizes or money.
What is the scale of Estimize in terms of users? 17063
What is the scale of Estimize in terms of dollars? Currently revenue is around $1 million per year, but growing (only a guess given how many clients)
If Estimize were to scale up to 10-100 times its current size, how well do you think would its business model would work? Very well. The incentive scheme doesn't change much, given that people are still able to view the consensus estimates, and the top analysts still receive prizes. In fact, the data has shown to be even more accurate the more people that create estimates (supported by the Wisdom of the Crowds), so if the company were to scale up 10 or 100 times, it would be extremely beneficial. Right now the company is currently trying to figure out digital marketing strategies in order to grow its user base.
What kind of organization is it? Privately held company
How does Estimize generate revenue? The company generates revenue in multiple ways - namely, they generate revenue by selling their data to quantitative hedge fund.

Other ways the company generates revenue is through the screener, which allows individuals to manage lists of stocks with given characteristics around earnings (see previous answer), and this screener is sold for a monthly fee depending on the assets the individual or company manages.

Finally, Estimize generates revenue through its leagues feature - companies pay Estimize both in cash as well as through prizes to sponsor a league and have their name appear on the page.