He’s Earned $50,000+ From Design Contests on 99designs

Albert Annan is from Ghana and recently posted this video on YouTube…

In the video, he breaks down how he has won 124 design contests at 99designs.

99designs is a marketplace for design services. The site connects graphic designers and clients.

See Albert’s profile on 99designs here.

There are two ways designers like Albert can earn money via 99designs…

For the purposes of this article, we’re focusing only on Design Contests.

To earn money via a Design Contest, Albert would pick one of the many contests running on the site at any given time, read the requirements, and submit his design.

Here’s an example of two 99designs design contests…

If the client likes Albert’s design the best, he would be named the winner of the contest and awarded the prize money.

Albert doesn’t say in the above video how much money he earned from the design contests he won.

But he does mention…

• That he won 124 contests out of 1,297 entries (9.56%)
• He secured 239 one-on-one projects and 58 repeat clients via 99designs

To estimate Albert’s earnings from the contests, I went ahead and scraped data for 1050 recently finished contests on 99designs and found that the average prize money was $488 per contest.

So Albert has likely earned $50,000+ from design contests on 99designs.

However, the average number of entries per contest was 141, so it seems there’s a lot of competition and it’s quite hard to win any particular contest.

Which aligns with Albert’s experience of winning only 9.56% of the contests he entered.

As such, if you’re going to use 99designs and want to maximize your earnings, it’s probably a better use of your time to pitch for 1-to-1 Projects.

Entering design contests might be a good idea if you want to gain some experience and build a portfolio that you can later use to improve your 1-to-1 pitches.

Worth noting as well that such contests are considered “spec work” and are controversial.