State of the Writing Market – oDesk, April 2011
Posted by bogdan247 on April 11th, 2011
oDesk claims to be the industry leader in remote work, and they have the numbers to back it.
The platform offers a comprehensive view of their ecosystem through their so called oConomy. The oConomy consists of various statistics, graphs and analyses that show how the hundreds of thousands of employers and contractors interact on oDesk.
The oConomy is a great way to visualize the massive number of transactions that take place on oDesk each second. People post jobs, others work on their assignments, and money changes hands relentlessly. According to the recently released monthly report, more than 16 million dollars were earned on oDesk in March alone.
March also broke the job postings record for oDesk, with 80,000 jobs being put up on the site, and more than 1.6 million hours being worked. This figure doesn’t include fixed-fee jobs, which are not logged by oDesk.
The March report contains valuable information about the top skills that are in demand on oDesk. I am glad to say that writing is one of the hottest skills on oDesk. This year, writing skills are the fourth most sought after specialty on oDesk, behind PHP, HTML and English.
I decided to create an in-depth analysis of the data provided by oDesk, to determine how hot writing skills really are, how does the writing market evolve and what future developments can we expect from it. Read it to see where you stand as a freelance writer on oDesk and where you can go from here.
Freelance Writing Market Snapshot
First, an overview of the entire market, to see how writing compares to other skills. We can notice a whopping growth of the entire platform, in terms of jobs posted, hours worked, earnings and number of contractors:
Another interesting statistic is the top of the most sought after skills on oDesk:
The numbers depict the massive growth of oDesk in the past year, which can be translated in a explosion in interest towards remote working. More and more employers shift from a traditional “bricks and mortar” business model, to a flexible, light-weight model where work is done by remote contractors. As a result, the monthly number of jobs posted on oDesk grew with 80% in a year, while the number of hours worked more than doubled. Again, this statistic doesn’t take into account the work done on fixed fee jobs, so the number of hours worked is certainly much higher. The booming demand has attracted numerous contractors on oDesk during the last year. At a growth rate of 106% year over year, the number of oDesk contractors has outgrown the numbers of job posted. This means that there is a growing competition for jobs among contractors, which is beneficial for the employers, who get a larger pool to select the best candidates for their projects.
As with any market where offer (work force) is larger than demand (job offers), there is a steady decrease of the price levels. The average hourly rates have gone down from around $13/hour in March 2008 to less than $9 in March 2011. That’s a 30% fall in a period of three years.
Note that these figures are calculated globally. When we break them down per country, we can see that the evolution of hourly rates differs from country to country. The hourly rates of US contractors have decreased with only $1 in the same three years interval, or 6% in relative terms. Other countries have actually gone up in the hourly rate statistic, such as Canada and, the most striking example, Russia. The average hourly rates of Russian contractors have increased from $16.5 to almost $20 since March 2008.
On the other end of the scale, contractors from Philippines and Pakistan have decreased their fees abruptly. In the case of Filipinos, the average hourly rate has decreased with 36% in the last 3 years, hovering around $4.5 during the last 12 months.
This different evolution from country to country can be explained when you consider the structure of the work force. In Philippines, almost half of the contractors are data entry clerks, the lowest paying category of workers. Only around 8% of the Filipino contractors are developers. Russia on the other hand, provides mainly developers at around 70%, which explains the high average rates that we see in the statistics.
Generally speaking, the overall tendency of falling hourly rates shows a growing competition inside the oDesk marketplace. More and more contractors from developing countries enter the marketplace, willing do more for less, and thus driving the price of workforce down. From the perspective of the employers this seems beneficial. But the ever-increasing number of workers flooding the market can make selecting a good professional more difficult. Contractors suffer in two ways – first employers come to expect smaller fees due to the high number of contractors working for little; second, it becomes harder to stand out in the huge crowd.
Read the rest of the analysis on the next page.
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