Freelancer.com Logo Contest Gets Thumbs Down

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Freelancer.com, one of the most popular online outsourcing services, announced its recent launch of “The World’s Largest Logo Contest Site” — a subsection of its existing website under the same domain.  The contest is slated to last just a week, but it wasn’t short enough for some graphic artists who use the site to secure freelance work.

The problem?

Freelancer’s website is an outsourcing tool, but its contest is a crowdsourcing tool.

Crowdsourcing vs Outsourcing

To understand the contradiction and what has some of Freelancer’s own service providers so upset, you have to appreciate the difference between crowdsourcing and outsourcing.

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Crowdsourcing offers a task to a group or crowd of people as an open call, enabling businesses to tap into a “collective” intelligence of sorts. Outsourcing offers contracted work to a single service provider. The work secured through an outsourcing contract is guaranteed. Work secured through crowdsourcing is not — and this is what has angered the very people who fund the site with their services.

Freelancer.com essentially invited its service providers to work for free in hopes of “winning” 290 dollars. Losing artists who participate in this contest and who submit their artwork will not get paid for their time.  As you might have guessed, a few of the disgruntled reacted on Twitter.

Effect on Buyers

The reaction from these graphic artists is expected, and predictable to anyone who supports themselves with the work they sell. What isn’t so obvious are the real problems that crowdsourcing brings to buyers. Some of the most notable issues are:

• The lack of a contract and therefore, the lack of guaranteed, quality work.
• No control over the quality of potentially hundreds of thousands of entries. (source)
• Higher costs required to bring accepted work up to par. (source)
• Unenforceable non-disclosure agreements risk exposing proprietary information.
• An inability to adequately monitor required hourly costs through a timecard.
• No access to arbitration services.
• The lack of a contract does nothing to stop participants from sharing submitted source code.

The Real Issue

Crowdsourcing seems to work for some people, sometimes, for some projects. Personally, we would never participate in a crowdsourced project for the reasons listed above. The last time I participated in a crowdsourced project, I was a 12 year old aspiring artist competing for a red ribbon.

But the real issue here isn’t whether crowdsourcing is appropriate. The real issue is that Freelancer.com, a website that promotes guaranteed, contracted work from service providers all over the world used a free-for-all contest to discredit its providers’ professional status and value.

That is what crowdsourcing does. And that is what Freelancer made painfully clear with a $290 contest.