January 17, 2014 : Crowdsourcing Week
Those two combined factors as well as the growing maturity of the category will trigger consolidation. It has already started: oDesk and Elance recently merged, Topcoder was acquired by Appirio, and established players like DesignCrowd, Freelancer.com and 99designs boosted their aggressive expansion through acquisitions. 2014 will see an acceleration of that trend and industry leaders will reach critical mass.