Great point guys. I changed the title on my site to "a $5+ million marketplace."

Well they take 10% of that or half a million dollars. That is not counting the $39.00 listing fee. That is not counting the upgrade fees. Sounds better than most startups.

Nice catch! Very misleading title. I thought they had $5mm in sales until I read your comment and looked more closely.

I think Warner does this a lot with his articles -- he's full of hyperbole. A proper editor would not have put that in the title.

From their site:

"there is a listing fee of $39 plus 10% of the prize being offered."

"$5,212,395 awarded"

"$108,100 up for grabs in 302 open contests"

  estimate on number of contests awarded = 5212395 / (108100/302) = 14561
  Total listing fees = 14561 * $39 = $567,914
  Total 10% profit is $521,240

That'd put total revenue since starting at $1,089,154 as far as I can see. Which is still awesome, but not really what is suggested by the article title.

They've run almost 23,000 contests instead of 14,561 according to their homepage. That's over $900K in listing fees alone.

Also, they charge for upgrades - bold, highlight, fast-tracked, etc. and charge designers to withdraw money.

We're still forced to guess - They didn't always charge listing fees. They started at $0, then moved to $20, then $29. There's no way for us to ascertain how many projects were done at each level.

>> "They've run almost 23,000 contests instead of 14,561 according to their homepage."

I figured not every contest would end with a successful award - hence using the other data as an estimate. Maybe it's somewhere in between, idk.