Is 99designs Facing an Existential Crisis Under the Blow of AI?

As a graphic designer, grabbing some side hustle money during my spare time has always been my go-to weekend routine. And for the longest time, 99designs was my absolute favorite playground.

My journey with this crowdsourcing platform dates all the way back to 2012. Since the platform has always leaned heavily toward logo & brand identity tasks, I participated in a ton of these design contests. Over the years, I submitted over 1,000 designs and walked away with more than 40 winning bids. Recently, however, my career shifted toward website operations, so I took a hiatus from submitting work.

But when I logged back in recently, I was absolutely shocked. The volume of active contests is now pitifully low. Back in the day, there were easily 600 to 700 active contests running simultaneously every single day. Now? barely over 100. Calling this a "cliff-like drop" feels like an understatement.



This got me thinking: Is this the inevitable fallout of the AI boom? For low-threshold, simple design tasks, AI can indeed whip something up in seconds. Or is it that the crowdsourced "contest" model itself has increasingly been rejected and boycotted by designers who are tired of doing speculative work? Let’s not forget, this is a platform that once raised tens of millions of dollars in VC funding!

Out of curiosity, I hopped over to check on DesignCrowd, one of 99designs' biggest competitors. To my surprise, their numbers tell the exact same story.



They only have about 69 active projects running right now. Based on my memory, this is another catastrophic drop.

So, I’m throwing this out to the community: Is this the direct impact of generative AI, or is the crowdsourced design contest business model simply dead? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

It's satisfying to watch the downfall of such platforms. Designers and other professionals have long been exploited by such platforms, it's time they went down

Nameless Knight said:

It's satisfying to watch the downfall of such platforms. Designers and other professionals have long been exploited by such platforms, it's time they went down

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Haha, it seems that you don't agree with the platform's business model either. Indeed, this model has caused designers to do a lot of useless work, and I stopped submitting for this reason later. And according to my statistics, about 20% of design contests result in full refunds from buyers, which is very frustrating!

That is quite a significant fall, especially when compared to the level of activity that one associates with those earlier days. But it is not the fault of the AI systems alone. the crowdsourcing platforms have had their fair share of dealing with changing client behavior and cheaper options.
It would be interesting to find out if the remaining contests pay more or if the quality of the opportunities has fallen with their numbers.

I used them before and ran a contest with different proposals, cool though a logo for $399 was seemingly pricey, even at the time.

Nameless Knight said:

It's satisfying to watch the downfall of such platforms. Designers and other professionals have long been exploited by such platforms, it's time they went down

Click to expand...

This is the right answer, and hope for many others too. I remember when they asked me for a selfie when main social media wasn't too restrict. Except several book contests never done anything there, but succeed to get paid for a logo design from 3rd party client for a far more then I would be "fight" through contests on 99designs.