5 Ways Outsourced Trust & Safety Saves You Money

For online businesses, marketplaces, and communities, trust and safety are crucial for managing risk, preventing abuse, and protecting your brand reputation. However, building robust in-house moderation and review capabilities requires significant people, processes, and technology investments.

Major digital platforms like Twitter, Shopify, Roblox, Meta, Airbnb, Twitch, Reddit, and Etsy leverage outsourcing partners to scale content moderation while improving safety effectively. This allows them to optimize costs and focus internal resources on core business goals.

Here are five key ways outsourcing trust and safety services can reduce costs for your business:

Pay-as-you-go model

With Hugo, you only pay for the exact moderation volume needed instead of carrying fixed labor costs. This empowers businesses to scale up and down efficiently as their community engagement and content review needs change.

For example, Reddit relies on outsourcing partners during new product launches to temporarily expand its moderation capacity without taking on full-time hires. When activity and volumes stabilize after launch, the outsourced teams can be reduced, minimizing overspending on labor.

This on-demand model allows you to adjust capacity based on user traffic trends, new market expansions, or growth cycles. Avoid getting stuck with overhead costs of permanent in-house teams when you only need temporary capacity.

Reduced infrastructure costs and ramp-up time

Moderating user-generated content at scale requires investing in robust technology infrastructure – review platforms, workflow automation, AI classifiers, reporting dashboards, etc.

While Shopify and Meta developed their own state-of-the-art moderation AIs, they rely on trusted partners’ proven knowledge of existing content management and analysis technologies to avoid the substantial costs of building ancillary moderation-specific systems entirely in-house.

This hybrid approach with selective outsourcing saves considerable technology capital and ongoing maintenance costs. According to Gartner Research, developing custom AI can cost upwards of $1 million, depending on complexity. Outsourcing allows you to allocate tech investments more strategically and create better models.

Eliminate hiring, training, and management costs

Sourcing, screening, hiring, training, and managing qualified in-house moderators with specializations like native language fluency or domain expertise requires heavy investment.

Top platforms like Twitch have eliminated these costs by leveraging outsourcing partners like Hugo, offering turnkey access to thousands of extensively trained and vetted reviewers tailored to client needs.

Hugo’s global workforce allows customized support even for rare dialects and expert content categories. This eliminates the cost of developing in-house training programs and sourcing niche talent.

Outsourcing also reduces ongoing management overhead since the partner handles day-to-day operations, quality control, and personnel development as part of the service.

Increased reviewer productivity

Leading outsourcing partners use proven processes, frameworks, and personnel management expertise to enhance moderator productivity measurably.

For example, after partnering with outsourced content review services, the online forum Reddit found their human moderators were able to review 20% more posts and comments daily compared to purely in-house teams. E-commerce company Etsy experienced similarly improved throughput by leveraging outsourced moderators.

This productivity advantage allows brands to moderate more content using fewer reviewer FTEs than solely in-house moderation. The specialization and focus of outsourcing partners drive efficiency gains than could be more easily replicable in-house.

Avoid fixed employee cost risks

When moderation is fully in-house, it incurs significant fixed costs beyond salaries – benefits, payroll, HR systems, paid leave, professional development, etc.

Outsourced solutions integrate these costs into their pricing model, saving companies like Twitch’s overhead for building internal moderation infrastructure and staffing.

This allows you to achieve safety objectives without inflating costs through large internal teams and expensive supporting tools and systems. Only pay for work delivered and leave the staffing logistics to your partner.

The right outsourcing partner applies a blend of skilled human reviewers and AI to deliver 24/7 moderation coverage, scalability, accuracy, and risk protection on demand. They act as an integrated extension of your team while optimizing budgets.

If you want to scale your trust and safety operations while reducing costs, Hugo has the specialized experience, global workforce, and security certifications to be a trusted partner. Click here to schedule a demo and learn how outsourcing your content moderation to Hugo can benefit your business.