Prizes.org Closes Shop

Thanks to Brian for sharing this unfortunate news from the prizes.org team.

Hello everyone,

We wanted to take a moment to thank our Prizes community for all of your support and provide a product update. Over the next six months, we will be retiring the Prizes.org product. By January 31, 2013, Prizes.org across platforms--on the web, Android or iOS--will no longer be supported. 

We’re so grateful to all of you for your participation and engagement since we launched last year, but the product isn’t experiencing the kind of adoption we had hoped for. We wanted to provide you with advance notice and some additional information about timing, exporting your text-based entries and cashing out your remaining credits:

• July 13, 2012 -- account creation and prize creation will no longer be available 
• July 31, 2012 -- Prizes Entry Exporter will be available for contestants to export entries 
• January 31, 2013 -- last day to cash out any remaining credits via PayPal

If you’d like to delete your account, you may do so by going to ‘Settings.’ Click on the ‘Delete Account’ link on the bottom right and enter your password. For more information, please visit our FAQ. 

We remain committed to our users, so if you have any questions or feedback, don't hesitate to contact us at help@prizes.org. 

Thanks again. It’s been a fun journey.
The Prizes Team

I only have one comment on this matter being that I've already written about it, they called it a "Product Update on Prizes.org."

Can you repeat that again?

"Product Update on Prizes.org"

No talk about people losing their jobs, no goodbye hugs and no warm fuzziness all around.

Alright, I'll make more comments. This is corporate Google talking, it saw a bad investment and now they're shutting it down. Kudos to the prizes.org team. From what I can tell, I think they knew it from the start. Maybe they have some metrics with regards to performance and revenue brought in.

From my perspective, it's Google just trying to enter the outsourcing scene halfheartedly.

At the end of the day, and I know some of you hate it when I say that, it was a very promising project that was poorly executed. They have the traffic which was still growing. What they lacked was content, if this project was outside of Google's hands, it would have flourished and competed with the best outsourcing sites on the web, like freelancer.com, odesk.com and elance.com.

Proof:
















They had the traffic

But they couldn't monetize and must have spent a small fortune on the contests. To think that freelancer.com's earnings was at $100,000,000 even if they only had roughly 60% of prizes.org traffic, something is really wrong.

They should have read one of my articles in how to build a business using freelancers....

Yep, prizes.org, it's been a wild ride.