If you have graphic design experience, check out the on-going logo design competition at 99designs for the Singularity Institute. There are still 6 days left to enter and be eligible to win the $295 prize if your design is selected. Tell your friends with graphic design experience too. There are very few submissions currently.
Note: This is a blind contest. Designers can only see their own entries. All designs will be revealed when the contest ends.
If you're interested at getting a peek at the designs, they will be online after the competition is over. This is standard practice in 99designs contests to prevent designers from contaminating each other and having all the designs drift in a certain direction.
I think there must be a lot of people who would like to work in their own time over the internet. I don't know if they are schoolkids, housewifes, or workers from the third world, but - whoever they are - there seem to be a lot of them. What there aren't enough of are enough opportunities to satisfy them all. If you look at some of the "hire an expert" sites, the prices seem pretty awful there as well - e.g.: http://www.scriptlance.com/
It does appear that prizes are good motivators - in comparison with a process involving screening applicants and awarding one of them the contract. Perhaps it is irrationality. Perhaps people would rather be doing their preferred kind of work - rather than attending interviews and putting together pitches. Maybe they are learning. Maybe they are padding their portfolio.
Whatever it is, prizes seem to me to be in demand - and so we can expect more prizes, until the demand for them is saturated.
I don't have a problem with the idea of scriptlance (assuming I'm understanding the site correctly). The internet drastically increases competition and that'll certainly drive prices down, but that's not inherently bad. I don't think there's anything magical about the traditional going rate for artwork, and having a market that caters to those with lower budgets is fine. The bids I'm seeing are pretty low, but they look like they're translating into something that you could actually live on. (Rough guesstimate is that they turn out to be around $10-15/hour... (read more)