The commerce of crowds

 

We know eBay is cool, and that Craigslist is eroding the classified advertising revenue that has sustained newspapers in plump existence for more than a century. But eBay and Craigslist are not particularly revolutionary. They are merely market structures that already existed, moved online and made more efficient and global. That was always going to happen.

 

One of the most interesting online marketplaces out there today is the creation of Australian web development company/publisher SitePoint. SitePoint Marketplace trades websites, but an interesting sub-market hosts graphic design “contests”. It’s been dubbed “crowdsourcing”.

 

Here’s the rub. You’ve just started a company, but unfortunately your creative design skills cannot hope to keep pace with your searing vision for the venture’s future. In the past, you’d probably pay top dollar to have a creative marketing agency develop your logo. And chances are you’d also get suckered into signing up for ten-times that for a co-ordinated national branding campaign.

 

OK for some. But if you just want a decent logo at a competitive one-off price, the SitePoint design contest infrastructure enables you to post a design brief, set the level of “prize” money and have a crowd of eager designers work-up concepts in the hope of being the one chosen.

 

“One of the things we’ve become really good at over the past couple of years is watching what’s happening on our site, watching what our community is up to and figuring out revenue streams and business models off the back of that,” says Mark Harbottle, SitePoint co-founder and Managing Director.

 

Neither the SitePoint Marketplace nor contests were intricately orchestrated. They were merely established around things that were already happening informally in SitePoint’s forums, which were originally established back in 1999.

 

“We started with the community,” says Harbottle. “There wasn’t a product; there were just people talking rubbish in our forums. All we’ve done is commercialise it.”

 

Participants are charged a listing fee of $30 (initial listing-fee revenue was used to develop supporting infrastructure) and contests have proliferated to include the design of logos, web pages (coded and un-coded), stationery, flash animation, buttons and icons, T-shirts, banner ads and even print.

 

It’s the kind of community-centric, organic growth that has characterised SitePoint’s rise from humble online publisher of technical web development tutorials to print publisher to online bazaar. It was named in BRW’s Fast 100 from 2004-06, and appeared in Deloitte’s Asia Pacific Fast 500 and Technology Fast 50 in 2004 and 2005. At the time of writing, SitePoint has an Alexa rank of 443, placing it in the top echelon of the world’s most visited websites.

 

So much about SitePoint is a rousing affirmation of neo-dot-com culture: If you build it, they will come, but this time you had better generate revenue. In an environment where build and flip is de rigeur, SitePoint has anchored its core focus on nurturing community and building revenue around it.

 

“Small companies have a significant advantage over big corporates. A big company launching a new product or service carries a lot of brand baggage. If you’re a start-up with no brand to speak of and a cool product, you’ve got nothing to lose from the start,” says Harbottle.

 

He believes the next big evolution of the internet – Web 3.0, if you like – will harness the full power of the web rather than merely emulating what has already been done in television and print.

 

“When television was first introduced, people basically sat down and read like they had been on radio. I think that’s what’s happening on the web right now. You go to a news website and get a massive pop-up ad, just like on commercial television. That’s not how it works. Look at MySpace. Those kids are all over it in a way that most tech-savvy adults aren’t. They’re the ones who are going to reinvent business on the web.”