[rhizome]

Would you feel the same way if you thought you were hiring a designer and they sold you what amounts to a template that they've used for a hundred other clients? After all, the designer would merely be a good steward of his time by maximizing the value of work already done.

Selling the same work to multiple business owners is the flipside of spec'ing out to multiple designers. Think of it as a contest to see who the best businessperson is, by seeing who can derive the most business value from the same design.

[farlington]

Great point. It's interesting to think of crowdsourcing websites as just another channel through which designers can sell templates.

If the customization/client service end is kept to a minimum, a 10% conversion would probably be a pretty nice, relatively hassle-free business. There'd be an initial investment of time in developing a stock of templates to use, but after that, a designer could probably profit off the same work for quite some time, with a minimum of effort dropping in logos, changing colors and swapping stock photos.

And for every 'contest' won, a 99designer would make way more than they could selling a single psd template—not to mention having a much more aggressive sales strategy and zero advertising costs.

It kind of makes you wonder who's exploiting who.