Next on ChatGPT’s Hit List? UpWork and Fiverr!
Way back, in 2011, when I was first starting out as a professional writer, I would look for any opportunity that was offered, to get traction.
Before content mills, before Medium, before blogs and social media, there was a small, unconquered corner of the internet that I accidentally discovered one afternoon.
It must have been a well-kept secret because I had never even heard of the site, even though I was already freelancing for people I had cold-emailed for over three years. It was clean, respectful, and honest. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was… Elance!
Elance was a bidding site for freelancers with unique skill sets and clients that needed them in a hurry.
Elance was the proverbial middleman.
It set up clients with a pool of freelancers and it gave those freelancers access to clients looking for paid assistance.
It was a great idea. So great, in fact, that oDesk, PeoplePerHour, Freelancer, and Guru copied it.
I was both a freelance writer and a freelance paralegal at the time and relished picking up new clients each week, many of which became long-term. I was paid well, on time, and the platform supported all users equally.
Around the same time, I stumbled upon Fiverr after a developer friend told me about it one day on the phone. Fiverr is also a marketplace that connects freelancers and clients, but it is set up differently. You have gigs that you place on the site, in a way that is similar to an Etsy shop. Anyone can visit your gig and place an order, but, at that time, there was no definitive way to flag down clients. They came to you, so it was of the utmost importance that you spiffed up each gig profile and let clients know exactly what they would get for that elusive $5 bill (its called Fiverr for a reason). It may seem cheap, but I wanted to lean more into my writing and it gave me a chance to do just that. I also took on some editing for which I received a rave review!
Eventually, I realized that there were many issues with the Fiverr setup. It was difficult to get a strong following on the platform because you were directly competing for work with hundreds, if not thousands, of similar freelancers with identical gigs. That means you only got to differentiate yourself with price, meaning everyone was in a race to the bottom.
You also didn’t really get a chance to speak to the clients directly when they were in the midst of choosing a contractor for their projects. That means that you could be exactly the person that they are looking for, but if you do not indicate on your profile that a particular project is something that you have done before, or something that you are perfectly capable of doing, you will get passed by. And, back then, the only way to stand out was to have prior high ratings from past clients, whom you can’t accumulate if you are unable to find work, because you have no social proof of experience, and so the cycle goes on.
If you do make it past the elusive velvet rope, Fiverr was, and still is, nothing to write home about. Its cheap clients turned to it to take advantage of desperate freelancers that were either just starting out, or had no idea how to market themselves to higher-paying clients outside of the platform. Yes, there were people there that did not speak perfect English or did not have talent in the particular specialty in which they purported to, but many of the freelancers onboard had the capability to provide clients with perfectly suitable work, still way above Fiverr’s starting pay grade.
Of course, folks can pay much more than $5, and freelancers are able to charge what they choose to, BUT, it should be said that many clients come to platforms like Fiverr to deliberately take advantage of desperate souls, and most of the time these contractors will work for appalling rates (I know, because I did).
However, if you have a family, bills, rent, or mortgage, or simply need to eat, and you live in a first-world country, you cannot exist at such rates.
Oh, and, on top of that, the platform insists on taking a 20% cut of all money exchanged, so it's actually “Fourerr,” if you will. From what I have heard, the commission remains the same now as it did when I joined in 2012.
Elance, on the other hand, was never as greedy, and clients could articulate exactly what they wanted, and freelancers could communicate directly with them by offering them proposals and bidding on their jobs. And, while there were paid options for membership, I made a decent living from using the free tokens I was given every month to bid on work. I also had long-running clients that I had for several months, or even years. But, that all changed when Elance merged with oDesk, in 2013, and subsequently rebranded to Upwork, in 2015.
Elance, which used to have wonderful clients and a bit of a barrier to entry gradually and slowly morphed into a mass marketplace of foreign workers that, through no fault of their own, slid the median rates lower than is feasible for one to survive on in a Western country. This is by no means a xenophobic rant. These workers actually gave Americans, like me, a serious run for our money. They were, and still are, just as dedicated, intelligent, focused, and talented as us, if not more. The thing is, it costs so much less to live in their respective countries than it does to live in the first world, that they could charge less than half my rates for work that is just as good as mine. That meant Westerners could no longer compete financially with such freelancers, and, as such, dropped off the platform or used it as merely a side hustle.
Upwork chugged along for a few years, siphoning fees off users for making less than an astronomical lifetime amount on the platform. At one point, that was as high as 20%, not unlike Fiverr, though those fees have recently dropped to 10%. The fees would also decrease if you continued to exceed certain thresholds of earnings on the website.
Of course, this wasn’t enough for the greedy overlords of Upwork, and they came up with seriously ridiculous methods for making money (I mean, like, move over Elon and “X”). They charged for connects, or the widgets used to bid on jobs, once you needed over a certain amount, and invented a boosting system, where you could boost your proposal over others for the client to see. Desperate freelancers flocked to any decent clients paying livable wages, and you could face up to 100 competitors within an hour’s time of any good job being posted. As such, this boosting power made you feel as though you had a prayer of being seen, though it never worked for me personally.
Finally, fraudsters and scam artists realized that they could make a killing on Upwork. After all, there were several ways to trick starving artists into revealing information that they would never otherwise disclose if they were not desperately seeking a gig or employment. Many folks have been conned and several have found that their personal data had been used to apply for credit cards or to drain their current bank accounts.
The thing is, Upwork is aware of these issues and does nothing about them. They are, after all, making money from freelancers purchasing connects to apply to these phantom jobs. As a matter of fact, it has been alleged (I do not have proof), that Upwork employees themselves are posting jobs that don’t exist in order to cash in on connect sales.
Ding Dong, the Platforms Are Dead
Well, the death blow for both Fiverr and Upwork, for clients seeking writers anyway, just maybe ChatGPT. I knew it wasn’t all bad, lol. After all, just like I said about the so-called content mills, why would any cheap-ass client give Upwork or Fiverr their patronage if ChatGPT can give them simplistic, nonsensical articles, which require heavy editing, for free?
I bet the board members of these fine companies, like myself and other writers, never saw this day coming — the day when their whole business model would collapse. But, since they took no issue with destroying so many of our freelance careers early on, I will feel no guilt taking pleasure in their respective downfalls. And, though they do dabble in other industries outside of content creation, the cheapskates that need developers and artists, for next-to-nothing, are also likely to turn to other forms of AI, over platforms, so the end is definitely near for these exploitative websites.