New opportunities in marketplaces for creative services
While the past 10 years have seen a big focus on marketplaces for physical goods (eBay, AbeBooks, etsy, et al.), there have been a few success stories of marketplaces for creative services in the past couple of years and it feels that this sector is poised to really take off. The most important success factor for these marketplaces seems to be how well defined the outsourced tasks are. Services that try to replace a complete marketing agency have not taken off, simply because the process is very hard to replicate in a standardized way. But marketplaces that are built around outsourcing a very structured task like designing a webpage or a logo (e.g. 99designs) or optimizing ad copy for search marketing campaigns (e.g. BoostCTR) have gotten some great traction and scale (99design has now over 50K designers on their marketplace). Looking forward to even more innovation in this space, there are still many inefficient processes left in the creative space.
Posted: December 3rd, 2009 under News.
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Comments
Comment from Brendon J. Wilson on December 3, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Agree wholeheartedly. Simply look at the likes of oDesk, iStockPhoto, and even Envato. All offering a marketplace for either skilled labour, or digital artifacts of skilled labour. Makes me believe there may even be a market for a tool/platform that enables you to build a marketplace of your own.
Comment from James Sherrett on December 3, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Totally agree that the marketplace for creative services is set to explode.
Don’t totally agree that the reason it hasn’t exploded yet is only because the processes being replaced are complex. Certainly it’s a big, big, big factor. It’s tough to replace high-touch process and workflows with blunt web tools.
But I think it’s even more important to look at who are the heavy buyers of creative services — ad creative agencies and inhouse creative agencies — and how they incorporate and adapt to new technologies.
Comment from boris on December 3, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Good comments from both of you – @James: would love to see more $’s moved over to marketplaces by replacing high-touch processes. The site / company that figures that out can build a really significant business.
Comment from Stephen W on January 28, 2010 at 11:40 pm
Once again, who would I talk to if I have an idea I could discuss with someone from this company over coffee just to see what you think. You never know, maybe I have the next facebook …
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