Member-only story
How a 56 Second TikTok Video Disrupted 4,600 Scientific Research Projects
Market research has been fundamentally changed by crowdsourcing
In July 2021 Sarah Frank, a rising freshman at Brown University, uploaded a 56 second TikTok video and disrupted 4,600 scientific research projects, Sarah is very active on social media and has 59,000 followers on TikTok. The video was about side hustles specifically Prolific.co. Prolific offers an online tool to easily recruit and pay research participants and conduct what it calls “ethical and trustworthy” research. That video got 4.1 million views in the month after it was posted and sent tens of thousands of new users flooding to the Prolific platform. The result was that Prolific’s pool of researchers in the U.S. jumped from 40,000 to 80,000 almost overnight. The influx of female researchers in their early 20’s dramatically skewed the demographics of Prolific’s survey pool. Over 4,600 research projects were impacted and Prolific ended up refunding research sponsors.
The TikTok Video
Sarah Frank is very active on social media. She has posted hundreds of videos on TikTok, has an active website, an Amazon storefront, published two books, runs a college admissions advice site, and built a non-profit. Here is Sarah’s video about Prolific:
