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Most of the complaints I hear about crowdsourced design services come from people who don't participate in them (just for the record, I don't either). It seems kind of presumptuous to say the designers are desperate and being taken advantage of. Maybe the long-term value is worth it for them (e.g., winning 10% of contests)? Maybe they find it a fun way to build experience?

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Crowd-sourcing is sometimes just cleverly marketed exploitation.

It's easy to forget about revisions, it's not unusual for a simple project to go through 3 iterations and several meetings -- all of which sap up time.

In a healthy crowdsourcing process, failed bids aren't all that different from thrown out iterations and dead-end meetings (in the long term).

They are different - because some companies are left with the task of only creating iterations (for which there's no payment)

Hence the "healthy" part (I agree with the general tone of the comments that this instance seems a little less than healthy).

In general (like an average 99designs user) a long term process where you win 10% of the bids can be entirely fine. Especially if the trade off is towards spending more time designing and less time in meetings.

(Worth noting too, many designers submit slight variations of the same design to multiple contests)

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