While the past 10 years have seen a big focus on marketplaces for physical goods (eBay, AbeBooks, etsy, et al.), there have been a few success stories of marketplaces for creative services in the past couple of years and it feels that this sector is poised to really take off. The most important success factor for these marketplaces seems to be how well defined the outsourced tasks are. Services that try to replace a complete marketing agency have not taken off, simply because the process is very hard to replicate in a standardized way. But marketplaces that are built around outsourcing a very structured task like designing a webpage or a logo (e.g. 99designs) or optimizing ad copy for search marketing campaigns (e.g. BoostCTR) have gotten some great traction and scale (99design has now over 50K designers on their marketplace). Looking forward to even more innovation in this space, there are still many inefficient processes left in the creative space.