Alex Pooley's Blog

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Arbitrary cultural differences present opportunities

The China Perspective reports that the Chinese native search engine Baidu has taken a 65.8% market share, against Google’s own 22% market share. In yet another blow to crystal ball gazers everywhere, Google’s fortune tellers failed to realise their prediction of market domination within five years as depicted in the charts in 2003. According to The China Perspective article, Google is in fact losing market share and Baidu is gaining.

Personally I think that too many people underestimate the value of being local and still buy in to the idea that the Internet is a wonderful device that simply scales businesses magically. At the end of the day, business needs to deliver what consumers want; and consumer demands and behaviours can change radically over geographic borders. The good news is that this leads to opportunities for those who seek them.

Ever had an idea and thought “there’s no way that would ever work”? Well, here’s a company that has set up shop with one of those “it will never work” ideas and seems to be doing OK. CrowdSpring is a design market place that allows buyers to offer a bounty and have multiple suppliers provide creatives for the buyer to select from. In other words, need a logo? Well get at least 25 made and pick the best one!

That’s crazy right?

At first glance it appears so. But if you consider the value of $100 to a fledgling Chinese arts student, or an Indian design company just starting up, then I guess you may see how the economics may work.

But wait, there’s a catch.

CrowdSpring guarantee at least 25 creatives to select from, or they will pay for your project! That’s a great guarantee, but it raises issues. Want a free creative? Browse through the current market place and find the sweet spot where buyers offer such little money that only a handful of people actually submit any work. Presto! Free design services paid for by CrowdSpring.

OK, not quite. I registered and tried to post a project and guess what? A minimum buyer price. A logo in this case would set me back at least $150. You could pick up a decent logo with unlimited revisions on Elance for $50.

With that said, the going rate for 25 website designs is $250, and there is a project sitting at 0 bids for $300 after 13 days, and another project awarded at $350 with only 6 creatives. So I guess you could pickup a free web site design for $350 ?

Unlike my first impression, you won’t get the services “cheap” because you’re forced to pay the going rate for 25 suppliers prepared to gamble on their work. But you will receive 25 creatives at a really good price. So for buyers, I think the value is in higher end work, the sort of thing where quality through options is valued more highly than work that is simply “good enough”.

Personally, I think there may be scope to start a business around a similar idea with website design. The reason being that web designs are more easily adapted to custom needs, so sellers would have a channel to sell unique one off designs, without having to design something new for every single project they bid on.

Best of luck to these guys. I’m behind anyone prepared to take a chance on a business.

More people search for wikis than blogs. This is one metric I use to gauge general growth. Check out what Google’s Keyword Tool has to say about [wiki] using the “Search Volume Trends” setting in the combo box.

OK, so maybe wikis are searched for more than blogs because of the nature of their use rather than their popularity. Whatever the case, searches on the up and that’s important for those with an eye on the long tail + SEO.

The graph above was created by Google Trends. Trends are created by analysing searches made through Google. Click on the graph above to see the results in Google Trends.

Happy hunting!