Imagine if the Chicago Tribune wanted to build data-driven apps from people on the streets downtown. Just like if they wanted to do telephony apps they'd have to spend $300k getting Asterix wired up properly and Twilio makes it work out of a Sinatra app; similarly, my sense is, Human.io is trying to do that for people-driven apps.
(In my parlance, publishers are the people with audience, developers are the people who code, and audience are the people that use the phone. In the wacky future, they may only be indirectly connected.)
Also, I think the emphasis on "humans" in your messaging obscures the point a little. You're not so much programming humans are you are transforming them into sensors.
In that sense, a little surprised the words "eyes and ears" appear nowhere on your front page.
Think of human.io as more of the platform you might build one of these on. We're not reselling a labor pool, we're making it possible to stay engaged with one, especially for folks that have large audiences that aren't particularly engaged (newspapers, etc.)
We're aiming at a different use-case though. Lots of people doing short one-off tasks around opinion and circumstance rather than paid specific tasks with a known, trained workforce.
For example: Say I need something from the county records of some place far from me but I need them quickly. I place a human.io call to pay $50 to whomever takes a picture of a series of documents first. That could be huge.