For me there's a bigger issue here than price, and it affects a larger market than just graphic design. I completely support the free market argument, and when 99designs and crowdspring first came out I viewed them as a great opportunity for young/inexperienced designers to work on small low-stakes projects that lacked capital and produce innovative work that would get them noticed. My experience with both sites and their users in the time since has dispelled that notion.
Sites like 99designs guarantee a certain number of users will submit entries for your project. While that's a great way to counter the possibility of low quality work, it poses a serious problem for designers (and eventually customers).
In most projects there is only one cash reward. That means if 30 people submit designs, only one gets paid. From a pure efficiency standpoint that means 30x the work is being done. Not only is this wildly inefficient, but it eventually leads to lower quality work overall.
Compare this structure to something like Amazon Mechanical Turk or SETI@home. In most 'crowdsourced' systems each user contributes value to a project by performing a small part of the overall work. There is often a small duplication of efforts to maintain quality and speed when a small number of users produce aberrant or delayed results. But overall the entire project is cut into small pieces and distributed to individuals. That's not the case here. Multiple submissions act as an insurance policy against poor quality work, but the very nature of the system treats that as the norm.
Requiring a dozen or more submissions suggests the management is aware of this issue. Higher quality designers will eventually tire of the much higher workload required to generate returns and migrate to other systems. The longer this system exists the more it will become the home of an unscrupulous breed of designers who simply change text from project to project.
Many 'designers' have a collection of 30 'logos' that are basically clip art that they use for every project. Since the return on their investment is so low it's not worth creating something new for each project. That leads to heavily recycled work and what can (and often does) become little more than a non-automated clip art text replacement tool.
There must be a better system in which creatives can actually divide work instead of duplicating it, and in so doing create a more valuable final product. The same problem exists on sites like Victors and Spoils for advertising
This system also exists in other fields, such as estate agents. Each house on the market will be listed by about 10 different agencies, yet only sold by one. So work is multiplied tenfold, and so commissions are high, because you're also paying the agent for the 9 other houses he didn't sell.
This seems to be a problem that isn't easily solved by market forces: If a new player enters the field, he has to put margins high, because he will only be able to close a small fraction of deals. The only solution would be for someone with sufficient cash reserves to launch a "hard-discount" agency, that would start making money once its market share starts growing.
Many 'designers' have a collection of 30 'logos' that are basically clip art that they use for every project
But how is this different from me having a custom framework I use for most projects? Or a library of code that I can reuse whenever I see the need for it?
Honestly, if I were looking for a cheap logo, "non-automated clip art" from a barely competent designer is better than anything I could put together myself anyway, so I wouldn't be too concerned that it was somewhat derivative of work the designer had done before.
Sites like 99designs guarantee a certain number of users will submit entries for your project. While that's a great way to counter the possibility of low quality work, it poses a serious problem for designers (and eventually customers).
In most projects there is only one cash reward. That means if 30 people submit designs, only one gets paid. From a pure efficiency standpoint that means 30x the work is being done. Not only is this wildly inefficient, but it eventually leads to lower quality work overall.
Compare this structure to something like Amazon Mechanical Turk or SETI@home. In most 'crowdsourced' systems each user contributes value to a project by performing a small part of the overall work. There is often a small duplication of efforts to maintain quality and speed when a small number of users produce aberrant or delayed results. But overall the entire project is cut into small pieces and distributed to individuals. That's not the case here. Multiple submissions act as an insurance policy against poor quality work, but the very nature of the system treats that as the norm.
Requiring a dozen or more submissions suggests the management is aware of this issue. Higher quality designers will eventually tire of the much higher workload required to generate returns and migrate to other systems. The longer this system exists the more it will become the home of an unscrupulous breed of designers who simply change text from project to project.
Many 'designers' have a collection of 30 'logos' that are basically clip art that they use for every project. Since the return on their investment is so low it's not worth creating something new for each project. That leads to heavily recycled work and what can (and often does) become little more than a non-automated clip art text replacement tool.
There must be a better system in which creatives can actually divide work instead of duplicating it, and in so doing create a more valuable final product. The same problem exists on sites like Victors and Spoils for advertising