Asking the question, “if everybody did this this would it still work” is not good enough to gauge sustainability. For example, if everybody were plumbers would society still work? No, but plumbers fill a certain need.

There is a point to be made that contest sites create more interest in custom design work. I'd like to hear from people who participate in these contests. They may have a different view on the subject. It could be a starting point in their career, or a relationship with a client who may want commissioned work in the future.

There is a need for both contest-type “spec” work, and commissioned work, and I think there is room for both.

Whole model is this:

Zadby sells online video audience to advertisers–for example 1M views in 18-34 demo. When advertisers buy the audience, they give us a pretty typical ad brief on how the brand should be integrated. Financial opportunity (rate per view) is included in the brief.

We have a cattlecall to our registered video producers for proposals. Those who hit 18-34s and like the financial terms and have a great way to integrate the product into their next video send us a proposal.

Advertiser approves proposals for creation and we facilitate payment of the agreed upon rate per view of the finished video to producers.

Does that make sense? Lots of small details, but that's the basic model.

I'm glad to hear that you are funding agnostic. We'd like to think that we're strong and sustainable–we've done 4 quarters of revenue growth in this economy and worked with a half dozen Fortune 500s to date not to mention some of the best online video producers on the net, so I hope we're scratching an itch for both sides of our marketplace.

Is it sustainable? If everyone did it, would it still work?

We love startups btw, no matter what program / who funded you. The more strong and sustainable ones, the better.

Interesting post–I always liked GeniusRocket and thought they had the ability to grow into the eLance or TopCoder of the creative space and really work for SMBs, but I didn't realize that they were using a straight contest model, which I agree does not usually work out well for the suppliers.

I'm curious if you're OK with a model like Zadby's (and please don't let the fact that we were funded by another incubator change your opinion). We do use crowdsourced video production talent, but we pay on a per-view basis so there isn't a binary or arbitrary contests-model payout. This payout structure attracts video producers with established followings (since they can pretty easily calculate how much money they are likely to make working with us). Perhaps most importantly, we only make money when our suppliers make money and we always give a transparent majority of the budget to our suppliers.

Is this the sort of crowdsourcing you can get behind?

Thanks for any feedback,
Beau

Similar but done right, everyone wins.