This question is specific to those people who design for marketplace websites like 99designs where a user chooses the design they feel is most adequate.
Let’s say you enter a contest for Company X, and after a few days and a number of revisions another applicant wins. You’ve poured a number of man-hours into the project and have got nothing out of it apart from what you feel is a good design. A lot of the time the auctions are blind, so you’ve got no way of even gauging whether your design is good or not compared to others.
Where do you go from there? Do you rebrand and sell it elsewhere (if so, where?), or do you display it on a portfolio? I’m looking to get started with some of these contests, although I don’t know what I’d do with all those (inevitable) failed designs.
If you work in a specific sector (e.g. legal) your design for a make-up goods shop cannot really be salvaged. The only other way I can justify my time in such a contest is if there was somewhere else I could offload designs to be sold for a cheap price. If I’m going to put work in I’d want to get something out of it, even if it’s only $100 per design.
This is why I wanted to get involved in them, because the money I’d earn even if I won an average contest would probably be on par with what I’d earn at work, but at least I’d get to try something new or hone my skills a bit more.
However, that’s on the assumption that I’d win, and when there are fifty other designs that you cannot see the odds aren’t in your favour. It might just be me getting negative again, but I’d rather build a website and get paid than work on the chance that I’d get a small amount of money.