Benchmarking Metal Prices: How Crowdsourcing Can Help Manage Your Purchases

by Jeff Yoders on FEBRUARY 24, 2017

When it comes to metal prices, is any one price really representative of the hundreds of transactions that happen every day? While market prices posted on exchanges are a good guide, isn’t it the transactions behind them actually move markets?

Organizations have been tapping the potential of crowdsourcing, defined by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism as the act of specifically inviting a group of people to participate in a reporting task—such as newsgathering, data collection, or analysis—through a targeted, open call for input; personal experiences; documents; or other contributions.

The British Parliament used a primitive form of crowdsourcing in 1719 to find a way to measure a ship’s longitudinal position. The Crown offered the public a monetary prize to whoever came up with the best solution. In 1970 French amateur photo contest ‘C’était Paris en 1970’ (‘This Was Paris in 1970’) — sponsored by the city of Paris, France-Inter radio, and the Fnac — got 14,000 amateur photographers to produce 70,000 black-and-white prints and 30,000 color slides of the French capital to document the architectural changes of Paris. Photographs were donated to the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris.

The actual term crowdsourcing wouldn’t be coined until 2005 when Wired writer Jeff Howe used it. Some organizations have successfully mined its potential to create powerful e-businesses. Netflix used crowdsourcing to improve its recommendation engine by 10%, attracting over 44,000 submissions. Wikipedia’s content is entirely crowdsourced from contributors to create a “free-access, free content Internet encyclopedia. Wikipedia executives have said the non-profit service never could have worked without crowdsourcing.

Lego Ideas is a platform that lets individual Lego builders submit their ideas, like this Volkswagen Golf brick creation, to the company for production. Kickstarter, GoFundme and other platforms have branched out into crowdfunding, using crowdsourcing to solicit donations for specific projects or, as in the link above, even funding for zoo animals like giraffes.

What Does This Mean for Metal Buyers?

MetalMiner recently launched a new metal price benchmark service. You can currently use MetalMiner Benchmark to compare what you’re paying for raw materials against 31,384,272 price benchmarks from 1,232 companies in 22 Industries. By adding your prices to the MetalMiner Benchmark database, the crowdsourced price database will grow exponentially.

We will continue to offer the latest transactional price information to you, the metals buyer, to inform your decisions about several forms of carbon steel, stainless steel, aluminum, nickel alloy and alloy steel on our safe, secure and anonymous platform. All data entered is validated for its accuracy and then only used for price comparisons.