The proliferation of crowdsourcing initiatives ever since the term crowdsourcing was coined in 2006, poses a challenge in understanding the theoretical concept of crowd-sourcing. The number of crowdsourcing initiatives mushrooms with many initiatives implemented before the crowdsourcing concept can be clearly and completely understood. In order to be able to understand the current state of crowdsourcing initiatives, a means to systematically view the myriad of existing crowdsourcing initiatives is needed. In this paper, we present our work on the construction of a taxonomy of crowdsourcing initiatives, which was built after reviewing a total of 60 exemplary crowdsourcing initiatives. The taxonomy, which consists of six components; user, process, content, platform, task and reward, can be used as a benchmark to better understand the current state of crowdsourcing initiatives with regards to the components that constitute the initiatives as it allows systematic comparison of existing crowdsourcing initiatives to be made. It can also serve as the basis for the development of metrics for evaluating crowdsourcing initiatives.