Japan’s Crowdworks adds another big local partner

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Crowdworks, which some readers may remember from its deal with Yahoo Japan back in January, added another big company, Benesse, to its list of partners. Benesse is a big player in the children’s education space but also runs a major female community site called Women’s Park, which has 4 million members. Through the partnership, there will be job and task postings on the community site from Crowdworks.

Crowdworks envisions three major goals: to establish a new working style for women, local neighborhood revitalization, and globalization. Housewives being the biggest user segment at Women’s Park, the recent partnership aims to tackle the first goal in the hopes of promoting new or alternative work styles for women, especially those with children.

As mentioned above, this is Crowdworks second largest partnership (behind Yahoo) with 300 billion yen in annual sales. The Yahoo tie-up didn’t take long to yield a positive effect, as within two days Yahoo brought in over 1,000 new user registrations.The two companies are searching for different ways to collaborate, such as promoting Crowdworks’ crowdsourcing via Yahoo’s advertisement business to crowdsource advertorial material.

Crowdworks released a new feature this month called the Arigato button, which works similar to Facebook’s likes, allowing clients to show gratitude and appreciation to individuals who have done work for them. In two weeks after the release, there have been over 20,000 arigatos already. In an email, Crowdworks’ CEO Koichiro Yoshida elaborated on the tie-ups:

The two companies we’ve partnered with, Yahoo and Benesse, are both 300 billion yen companies. After just a year since Crowdworks’ launch, we were able to accomplish this milestone. It clearly shows the exciting potential of the crowdsourcing industry.

Within a year, the total amount of client work posted on the site has exceeded 1.2 billion yen with over 6,000 companies using the site. The aging population of Japan is forcing for a paradigm shift to take place in the ways people work. This partnership between Crowdworks and Benesse will open new doors for people, and allow resources to be better leveraged.