Effective community management for your online platform relies on high-quality content moderation. With tons of user-generated content that needs to be reviewed continuously, you’re surely pondering how to go about handling your moderation needs — with an outlook for scaling your business.
The in-house vs. outsource dilemma is common for online companies across industries that have to ensure adequate review of user content. It’s an important decision that you need to take early on in your platform’s development. This is how you can ensure a good application of your Trust and Safety program for users’ sake, compliance with relevant regulations, and protection of your brand reputation.
Both in-house and outsourced content moderation have pros and cons — and it’s a matter of weighing which option is most suitable to your current needs. Let’s dig into the pros and cons of each option, so you get an overview of what would work for you — while knowing you can always count on Imagga’s AI-powered automatic moderation platform, whichever choice you make.
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In-House Content Moderation
Many companies prefer to build a content moderation team in-house. This is a long-term investment that certainly brings a number of benefits — but does have its drawbacks too.
Pros
Having an in-house review team allows you to have a high level of control over the moderation process. Being in the same office, you can easily tweak procedures and guidelines to adapt to new circumstances and trends.
Tackling moderation in-house also provides you with an in-depth view of the functioning of your online platform. You can have a fully hands-on approach in its development, recognizing challenges as they arise.
With an internal team, you can ensure improved consistency in moderation policies, as it’s easier to teach new staff and even pass down intuitive knowledge on difficult cases. This means shorter times for decisions on controversial or politically charged cases since your team members are aware of your company values and better understand what’s the best move in terms of your Trust and Safety policy.
Add Imagga’s full or semi-automated AI-first Content Moderation to the mix and your internal team will be relieved from reviewing repetitive inappropriate content and left to deal only with controversial or sensitive cases.
Cons
Creating an in-house moderation team can be expensive. It can be difficult to hire the necessary number of employees at once, which means you may be slow to start with your content review.
Another potential downside of in-house moderation is that your newly founded team will need training. Even if staff members are experienced in the field, they’ll still need to get up to speed with the right content moderation strategy for the project at hand. You’ll also need to provide moderators with adequate psychological support due to the job’s increased risks.
Outsourced Moderation
Hiring an external team to take care of content moderation is a popular option for many online businesses, including giant social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It can be a good choice for your company too — but let’s first look at its pros and cons.
Pros
Outsourcing content moderation can save you time and money. Typically, a third-party vendor would have a faster and better-trained moderation team. You’d be able to benefit from their expertise immediately.
This is also important considering the growing online risks. An outsourced expert team that keeps tabs on security threats would provide you with the top strategies and methods for moderation.
Having an outsourced team bundled with Imagga’s Automated Content Management Platform will further shorten the moderation time and make it, even more, cost-efficient as huge amounts of content that needs to be reviewed can be sorted out automatically.
Cons
Collaborating with your external moderation team may be challenging. It’s important to have a contact person at the third-party vendor, so you have a one-stop communication point.
With moderation outsourcing, ensuring flexibility, adaptability, and continuous learning may also be more difficult. You’ll need to make sure that your moderation partner understands thoroughly the cultural and linguistic specificities of your business. Frequent exchanges are also key to ensuring continuity in the moderation process.
How Imagga Can Help You Ace Your Content Moderation
Whether you opt-in for in-house or outsourcing, Imagga is your trusted content moderation partner. We offer a complete AI-powered content moderation solution that employs the best from artificial and human intelligence.
Our automatic platform uses advanced Artificial Intelligence algorithms to provide precise filtering of unsafe content, saving tons of work hours that otherwise moderators have to spend in reviewing.
The automated content screening is self-learning, so it gets better the more you use it. Plus, you can fully control the settings of the moderation process: you can select and set up different projects, batch sizes, priority levels, privacy issues, and assigned moderators, to mention a few.
With Imagga’s content moderation platform, you have full freedom to choose whether you work with your in-house moderation team — or an outsourced one. You can easily plug in your in-house moderators in our AI platform, or hire external help from us that’s going to seamlessly enhance the automatic platform.
Ready to get started? Contact us for a demo of our AI-powered moderation solution or to learn more about Imagga’s content moderation services.