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Why Designers Hate Crowdsourcing
An anonymous reader writes "Since Wired's Jeff Howe coined the term in 2006, 'crowdsourcing' has been a buzzword in the tech industry, and a business model on the rise. 99designs.com is a site that hosts design contests for small businesses requiring relatively smaller design projects. Anyone can submit their near finished pieces of work to the contests, but only one winner gets paid. Forbes covers just why established graphic designers are so angry at this business model's catching on."
This is no different than Expedia disrupting the travel agent industry, iStockPhoto allowing designers to buy photos shot by amateurs for $1, or eTrade allowing people to do their own stock trading for $9 a piece.
The only people that complain about disruptive innovation are those directly affected by it. Gone are the days when you can charge $5000 for 3 logo concepts when some college student is happy to spend 2 hours cranking out a concept in his spare time for the chance at winning $269 - the price quoted on the 99designs logo design page.
No, it's more like this.
Imagine your Boss came to you and said "We're having 10 programmers make the same program, but we'll only pay one of you". That means that 9 of them end up working for free. That's why they hate that business model, no serious graphics designer can make a living out of such contests.
They hate it for the same reason that the music industry hates the Internet, they lose control of the marketplace and are unable to charge a premium for intangibles. Basically, the established design professionals are used to being able to charge more than the value they add to the product because it was too hard to find good alternatives. I am not saying that experienced, quality design professionals do not add significant value over most of what you can get from crowd sourcing sites. It's just that they want to charge more for that value than what it is worth in today's marketplace. When it was hard to find people who had a natural talent for design for a particular product or market segment, it was worth paying more for people who were proven at creating good designs for many different areas and additionally had experience in what types of design seem good in development, but turn out to be bad ideas in production. Now that it is easier to find people who are inexperienced, but have a natural talent, that experience is less valuable.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Sounds to me like there's a supply and demand problem for these established designers... namely there's too much supply for the available demand.
I understand their position: for someone outside of the design industry, it can be difficult to know who to go to with a project. So large, established designers get good business, just because they have enough of a reputation to appeal to the more conservative business types. But the prices they're charging are well above the market optimum, and they thrive off of imperfect knowledge in their client base. An organization like 99designs.com gives small, unknown, but potentially talented players access to the client base that has typically been reserved for the big guys. This drives the actual price of services (when amortized over all the work that doesn't get paid for) down to the actual economic optimum.
In other words, it's an industry bitching about the internet killing their business model. Yawn.
It's the same in any industry...once a group of people figure out how to make an income they then put bureaucratic barriers (e.g. legal, regulatory, educational, or certification requirements) in place. They then develop their own lexicon which future puts an informal educational barrier in place and they treat anyone who doesn't speak their cant as an outsider. It's a natural evolution where they try to protect their income by making it harder for the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th person through the door to accomplish what they have. This of course struggles against technology and innovation which is making it easier and eventually innovation overcomes the barriers but in the mean time the dinosaurs fight ferociously to live in the manner they have become accustomed to. See RIAA, MPAA, Software Patents, all certified careers, etc. etc. etc.
You put a job up, you pick the "winner", and it gets fulfilled.
Then you see the same design has been shopped around to every other site, including your direct competitors.
Then you see that this "design in a box" approach actually handily ignored many of your stated requirements in your original request.
All this to save a few bucks on design by farming it out to people who do this for literally a few bucks a job. You get what you pay for: a $50 design that looks cookie cutter (because it is), and is designed by "e-lancers" from India and China who didn't understand all of your requirements and in most cases, didn't have time to care, because they'll only see $10 of it.
Frankly, I can see why they're angry. This business model reduces their profession to amateur hour - and it can only hurt it in the long run.
I've worked in both the public and private sector. There is a reputable way to select somebody for a contract in a competitive setting. It's called a request for a quote, or RFQ (or request for a proposal, RFP). A general call goes out to businesses and people in the required industry. Proposals are collected, with projected timelines, pricings, and samples. Then, a decision is made, and the winner gets the contract. The losers go on to bid on other contracts.
The point, though, is that the time spent producing the final product is spent only by the winner. Everybody else moves on.
Now, that's the right way to do it. What's described in the article is the wrong way to do it. Imagine, for a moment, that you're a web site designer (I know the article is about graphic designers, but bear with me here). How would you feel if instead of preparing a proposal for a part of a website, you had to prepare the entire finished product - and then, after those hours of work (that could have been spent on working for a paying client, or in finding a paying client), you find out that somebody else got the contract, and therefore you get nothing?
Somehow, I think you'd be pretty pissed off too.
Now, this may be fine if you're just starting out, but it's not going to sit well once you've got a few years of experience under your belt. The really good people are going to get sick of it and do one of two things - they'll either leave that model and just work for the people who will treat them like professionals, or they'll leave the field itself.
Will amateur hour be cheaper than dealing with professionals? Absolutely. But, in the long run, it will drive the real talent out, and that will just make the field poorer.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
If this continues, you will not see a single person their who has a degree above a high school diploma.
if higher education in design does not provide a strong enough competitive advantage in terms of output quality, than such education is a waste of resources and should die off. this isn't medicine or engineering where fuckups kill people. the worse that happens is a design does not win, or a company chooses a crap design and has an ugly logo or website until they figure out that it sucks and change it.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Except there is no boss, this is freelance contract work. This website is for turning a hobby into a chance to get paid, not steady employment. Bored? Make a logo, post it. Profit, or don't, it's still more money than you'd have gotten paid playing video games all day.
Any profitable business is based on some barrier for entry for competitors. When the barrier gets lower, the profitability inevitably goes down to zero as a result of unhindered competition. This is called free market.
Being angry about this is like being angry at gravity or evolution.
Which means that everyone else that submits work has essentially done so for free. No one would want to work like that, and such crowdsourcing is in no way a viable path for real, fulltime employment. Besides, I'd be just as worried as a client. I post vague specifications and hope for the best? That's asinine. Good design work requires that the artist and the client work back and forth, improving and changing the product little by little until both are satisfied. You don't get that here. What you get with crowdsourcing is mostly mediocrity. Why invest tons of effort into something that you very likely will not get paid for?
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Then most professionals would laugh in your face at such a concept and walk away. Those who want to pay peanuts, end up hiring monkeys. If the business arrangement doesn't suit you, don't enter it. That person would *never* have been your customer anyway because the way they want to scrimp and save and "only pay one person" means they were always looking for a cheap way out - and any *decent* designer wouldn't be satisfied with what they were offering. The designers haven't *lost* any business, they just aren't getting any from a new "auction-style" job market that's cropped up. That's up to them, but it's hardly a jobs nightmare. At any point in history, in any profession, the same thing could have (and has) happened.
The problem that 99designs solves is that most clients don't need a $20,000 design and don't have $20,000 to spend.
Years ago I worked for a company that made point of sale systems. They had a logo that looked like a monogram on someone's shirt. It was drawn by a marketing VP who had no design experience, in the early days of the company. Eventually it became an embarrassment and they hired a consultant who made a new logo, new letterhead, etc., for $80,000.
But the thing is that they only sold to industry and didn't need that degree of expertise. Something from 99designs would have been good enough, and if it happened to look exactly like the logo some real estate management startup in Boise, Idaho was using, too, so what. Since then I've worked for a bunch of startups and the logo and website design has always been a problem. Usually it gets done by somebody's kid or somebody's friend, because startups don't want to spend thousands of dollars on a logo unless they're selling a consumer product.
Freelance writers have long complained of similar practices amongst "content mills" such as Demand Studios (the guys behind all those "how to" webpages). The mill pays $3/story, $15/video. For a working writer or videographer, it's the kind of revenue that puts the "chump" into "chump change." But -- and here's the catch -- thousands and thousands of people will work for this! Many full-time writers sneer at them as mere wannabes who are pissing into the community pool, but their work is (apparently) good enough for The Client, and these folks are happy to be making some beer money "writing professionally." The thing is, there are so many writers -- and designers, too, apparently -- and the bar for entry into the profession is so low, and the, well, "romance/coolness" of being a paid (however niggardly) creative artiste is so great, that the Content Mills have such low overhead they are making money hand-over-fist.
Of course, if you're really good at what you do, you get to name your price and you do well. But if you're in the bottom 90 percent of a profession whose products -- such as words and designs -- aren't constrained by artificial geographical boundaries and location (thanks to this new-fangled Internet thingy) then, brother, you are scrapping and scrambling.
Sorry, it is my business. You see, we have this thing called free speech. Using it, one may express opinions and attempt to sway the opinions of others. I am of the opinion that CEOs, as a class of people, are overpaid for the value they provide society, and I am attempting to convince others to resist the transfer of wealth from the working class to the elite. I understand that these views are not popular with the elite, and they would prefer me not to exercise my free speech, but seeing as how I have little sympathy for the desires of the elite, I don't think I will comply.
Claiming that I am not in the real world, and assuming that I do not and have never owned a business is certainly expressing your opinion, but I would hardly call it civil discourse, and it is unlikely to sway the opinion of anyone not already decided on the matter.
Hopefully, this small lesson in civics will help you understand how society functions.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The trouble is apply this to every industry and all of a sudden it's not overcharging fat cats that add no value that are affect: Suddenly there is no way to make a decent living. The only industries that survive are the ones that require qualifications.
In other words I agree that charging $5000 for 3 logo concepts isn't necessarily reasonable, but I don't want to see only amateurs compete for a single prize pool of $269 either. Effectively most people are working for free. That's not reasonable either. Surely there's a middle ground?
Nope. Welcome to globalization! Billions of third world people just waiting to do what you do for 1/10th the price. Expect your living standard to trend towards theirs, because if it's one thing this planet has, it's a huge excess of available labor.
Advice: on VPS providers
If the design isn't picked, the designer still owns all rights to it and can submit it again.
Um, you might want to read the "contract" very carefully. Most such contests have wording hidden out in the fine print to the effect that all submissions become the property of the company running the contest. So if 1000 people submit entries, the company pays for one of them, but legally owns the other 999. Read the tiny language that comes with most such contests, and see if you can spot where it says this. They can be clever at obfuscating the wording, but with careful reading you can usually spot it.
I've seen a couple of writing contests run by publishers that play the same trick. The top-rated 2 or 3 stories get a reward, but the publisher publishes an entire book of the top N stories. If the authors of the other stories complain, the publisher just quotes the above passage from the contest rules, and refuses to pay anything to the other "losing" authors.
(This is all in the USA; other countries may outlaw such misleading trickery. But probably not many countries do. Anyone here have any data about this?)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
There are various "coders for hire" sites and such like that. The sites do well, but they are not truly disruptive to the software industry. This is because few professional programmers will put the time and effort into going there because the rates are terrible. And few serious companies use it because they can't get quality for the prices they are offering. But bored students, the unemployed, a few freelancers, and inhabitants of undeveloped nations will look for work there.
The question is: what percentage of the demand for this product can be met by that market segment?
It may turn out that the average corporation can't tell a good design from a bad one. If so, then graphic designers will start to go out of business until either the corporations realize that their designs aren't working, or until graphic designers realize that design quality doesn't actually matter. I suspect reality lies somewhere in between: cruddy designs are good enough for a lot of the market. Only the best designers will survive to get the remaining high-end contracts.
I'm being honest about where rights come from: agreements between individuals. I'm not advocating using violence, I'm saying, we don't have to agree to do things the way we do. That 'private transaction?' Is it really private? Says who? Two parties arguing over the price of a slave would tell an abolitionist that the transaction is none of their business, and society used to agree with the slavers. Now, thanks to people expressing their opinion, we do not consider that transaction a private matter anymore. I imagine that some transactions we presently see as private will, in the future, be seen as impacting others outside the transaction, and thus not private. CEO pay may well become one of those things that, like slavery, we don't consider a private matter.
You may not believe me, but freedom is my goal. You see, money is power, and someone with money can limit the freedom of someone without. I don't want to end the wealth disparity do much as I want to end the power disparity, which I see as limiting freedom. You probably see the power disparity as a natural consequence of freedom, but 'freedom' is a slippery word that way. Do I have the freedom to swing my fist wherever I like, or do you have the freedom not to get hit in the face? How about pollution? Do I have the right to buy garbage and bury it on my land, or do the externalities involved make that your business, too?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The rich have been taking from the poor for decades now, real income for the bottom 80% of America has been stagnant since the sixties. In the same period, the top 1% has gone from earning 8-9% of the GDP to earning 20% or more. I am advocating that the poor look after their own interests and stop letting the rich take from them.
That is why we have government, to protect the weak from the tyranny of the strong.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
> "Real" designers work the same way, often developing several candidates for consideration or being pitted against other designers.
Uh, poor designers work the same way. "Oh, I get a portfolio item, THANK YOU" is not a business model.
The real story is that bad-to-average design is no longer scarce. The tools are ubiquitous, and many people play with them. So you're going to see a tiered economy: the wannabes doing spec work for minimum wage on places like istockphoto.com and the golden glorious few doing high touch client-focused work for $200 an hour. Similar to whats happening in photography and journalism, and for much the same reasons.
I compare the risk of designers being crowdsourced as similar to the risk of engineering jobs being outsourced. It was only a matter of time before this would start to happen. In the same way that news reporters may be getting replaced by Twitter, the Phone book may be getting replaced with Facebook, and CDs were replaced with MP3s. You just gotta take the change and live with it, all professions will be effected as technology, the internet, and massive scale multi-user interactions become more pervasive and extensive.
If you do consistently excellent work, and consistently meet client needs, you can charge for it. If you are a hack then the pressure will expose you as such.
The thing is, with crowdsourcing and more competition... the clients of designers who currently "meet clients needs" and do excellent work may try the service and soon find, while their designer of choice WAS meeting their needs, and they were very happy before,
They find that people competing in a contest more than just meet their needs and what they asked for they exceed their expectations. IOW, they could get superior results from the contest medium, even if they were exuberant and perfectly happy with a paid designer before.
Or it was less expensive to get the same great result. They didn't have to pay someone who's built a business on providing the service to people.
Suddenly the skilled professional designers who have had years of professional training and huge portfolios great work may find themselves on a level playing field with random people who hardly know about anything at all and just have a natural talent.
I can see why pro designers wouldn't like this. They have a lot to fear really. The profession "graphics designer" could cease to exist, or the expectations of pay could drop, for most jobs, where the crowdsourcing alternative exceeds or adequately replaces them.
Graphics artists might have to go back to school or switch fields, if they went into the job for profits, or were used to the fact the explosion of the world wide web and e-commerce made the design profession so important and lucrative....
Only to the extent a job really does require special ability, special skills, or peculiarly uncommon knowledge to perform, will they have any sort of robust protection against crowdsourcing, outsourcing, etc.
Crowdsourcing only works for abilities the masses have and that the masses are willing to share/compete for an award using, rather than receiving payment.
99designs should work just fine and have great results, even if every professional designer in the world vows to never compete or submit any design on it.
My design firm charges by the hour. If you want a logo that we did in an hour, we can do that, in an hour. The prices is one times our hourly rate. It is not going to be the best logo, but it will only take us one hour.
If you want to have two planning conference calls, a focus group, then six rounds of comps and five final versions for various mediums, a favicon, a 125x125 banner and more, then it cost as much as time as it takes.
If clients do not like this, then can negotiate the world of crowd-sourceing, getting a cousin to do it and mocking it up themselves.
The problem with all that is that if you want a change later on, you are on your own, If you need a two color version for a silk screen, you might be SOL. If your cheap logo is not 100% vector, good luck putting it on a billboard or wrapping a vehicle.
Just as anyone can work on their own plumbing or get some cheap person to do it, there will always be a market for creative professionals who know what they are doing.
If you are losing work to the design sites, you don't want those clients anyways. Or you can let them get their logo from a contest, then design their business cards, website, make money brokering their ads/print/etc/, and create a long term relationship. That could happen as well.
They hate it for the same reason that the music industry hates the Internet, they lose control of the marketplace and are unable to charge a premium for intangibles.
It's not "a premium for intangibles." It's the opportunity to get get paid for your time vs the expectation that you'll work for free unless your work is utilized.
What do you do? You an IT worker like most of the site? Let's say you troubleshoot systems -- how about we say that you don't get anything old fashioned like a salary or an hourly wage anymore: instead, you'll compete with others to see who can find/fix the problem first. The person who does that gets paid a flat rate. Everyone else gets nothing. Or, let's say you write code. You and one hundred other coders provide to spec. First one gets something, everyone else doesn't. No messy employee-employer relationship -- that stuff is for communists and music industry racketeers, right? Just pure market transactions. Beautiful, right? Certainly nothing you could have any complaint against -- in fact, if you really believe in your comment, truly and deeply, back it up: suggest that arrangement to your employer tomorrow.
After all, you wouldn't want to be like a music industry dinosaur, and frankly, if you're drawing either a salary or hourly wage off of it, you're exactly as much like the music industry as a graphic designer.
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