Recent organisational and technological changes à la Uber have generated a new labour
market fringe: a digital class of workers and contractors. In this paper we study the case of
CoContest, a crowdsourcing platform for interior design. Our objective is to investigate how
profitable this type of work can be, also from a cross-country perspective, and why
professionals choose to supply work on such a platform.
Given the low returns, one might expect to see a pattern of northern employer/southern
contractor. Yet analysis reveals a more nuanced pattern, in which designers supply their
work even if they live in Italy, which is a high-income country. For these designers work on
CoContest can make sense if they are new to the labour market and face high entry barriers,
although crowdsourcing does not offer them profitable employment full time. The case of
Serbia, the second-largest supplier of designers, is different, however. As a result of
differences in purchasing power, if the market grows experienced Serbian designers can
expect to make a living from crowdsourced contracts