Another milestone for another successful crowdsourcing platform as Australia's DesignCrowd announced it had reached 100,000 users, doubling the size of its business in the last year.

As the name suggests, DesignCrowd is an online marketplace that connects freelance designers with businesses looking to harness their skills, primarily via a contest model. The platform claims major brands including Virgin, Showtime, Amnesty and Harvard among its business users, along with what it describes as "a boom in small business demand."

Related:
- DesignCrowd Moves Into Asia
- A Look at Crowdsourcing Design So Far

Supplying that demand is DesignCrowd's 100,000 designers that serve both the global and local markets.

“It's now possible for a small business to access 100,000 designers online. This is one of the reasons crowdsourcing is disrupting the traditional design industry. We now have twice as many designers on DesignCrowd than the whole of the United Kingdom,” DesignCrowd's CEO and founder, Alec Lynch said.

Actually the number is more than the number of designers in London (40,000) and New York (16,000) combined.

DesignCrowd has gone to some lengths to ensure that they aren't simply operating a digital sweatshop for starving creative types as well. The platform says it has paid over one million dollars in participation payments to designers who did not win contests, and launched BrandCrowd, a premium logo marketplace where designers can monetize unused designs.

Madison Avenue might not yet feel that DesignCrowd's model is an "everybody wins" approach, but it seems that just about everyone else might.

Here's a few more statistics culled from its platform that the company sent along:

• Top countries that crowdsource are the USA , Australia, and the UK, with strong growth in 2013 in the US and Brazil, Singapore and Germany.
• The top 3 design types requested by volume are logo design, web design, and graphic design. The fastest growth is in app design (driven by the iOS and Android boom), Facebook page design (now with 1 billion users, the best way for brands to connect with consumers), and book cover design (driven by the rise in eBook publishing).
• Designer demand for crowdsourcing has doubled in the last 12 months - with registered designers now at 100,000 on DesignCrowd.
• Small business demand for crowdsourcing has doubled since late 2012 and is booming in early 2013 - DesignCrowd has seen more than 50% growth in posted projects already in 2013.
• The top designer countries by volume are the USA, India, UK, and Australia with Indonesia, the Philippines, and Pakistan the top emerging countries.

 - Eric Mack is Managing Editor for Crowdsourcing.org.  He has covered business, technology and politics for more than a decade for major outlets including CNET, CBS, AOL, NPR, Wired, and the New York Times.  You can contact him at eric.mack@crowdsourcing.org. Find him on Twitter and Google+. Also be sure to follow Crowdsourcing.org on Twitter and join our Crowdsourcing community on Google+.