Hey There!!! Myself Nirbanjyoti das.An Internet marketing expert ,
seo and digital marketing analyst working in this field last 1 decade. I have
wide experience in online working , freelancing , project management , seo ,
link building and Internet Marketing etc.
Since start, I am running a small team in my city - Kolkata,
India. The rapid revolutions of internet gave us the opportunity to work and
earn remotely and self sufficiently or independently. Not depending on others.
This gave us another problem as well. The competition, where if you week and
cannot fight you will never survive. You will continue fire your arms and your
enemies hidden in cave. No one is dying.
The same thing happen in elance-odesk-upwork case. The upwork site
was previously known as odesk. Where it was awasome initially. I used to get
jobs easily when I put my prices. The prices were low as well. The clients
could easily got a freelancer in $1 per hour rate in my niche ( As you know
which is - Internet marketing , seo , link building etc work). These low prices
gave odesk a really value and impotency to freelancers. Because a new
freelancer could easily find its work when he be able to manage and deliver the
same quality of work in low prices. The clients are obviously outsourcing for
low prices as well as same quality. If someone find that the marketplace way
pricey or same costly like doing the things locally, no one will hire
outsourcers.
The elance on the other had was known as a high quality
marketplace. It was actually business to business marketplace. There were big
companies or big team providing very high quality work and delivering high
quality services. The minimum hourly rate was $3. So, clients will find quality
there.
So far, what you read is just a brief elance for whom and odesk
for whom. They both target separate things. Odesk target small team,
freelancers etc where elance target the big team, big projects high quality
work etc.
I have seen the headlines stating the initialization of doing
something great in 2013. The Elance and odesk announce they will do something
which will really great. Something which will help clients, freelancers,
contractors. Something that will enhance the way we do freelancing. Something,
there will be more technology. Behind this development there was strong
business policy which will ultimately and aimed to enhance the profit to the
both companies. The both companies told that their marketplace is just $1
Billion and they would like take this market to $10 Billion dollar by 2020.So,
you can clearly understand they want to make business $2 billion dollar of
business each year.
While they want to mix up the both marketplace, new changes are
going to take effect starting with 2016. While working with elance I was very
happy, there were some features where upwork can never reach. The elance is for
quality service providers and odesk for low quality service providers. Elance
was for big companies and upwork was for small companies. The dis advantages of
working on upwork follows -
Quality of jobs and clients - The quality of jobs
and clients are very bad. They’re very low quality clients. The clients don't
very hard mentality to hire freelancers. There are lots of clients in upwork
form Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines and they don’t really have enough budgets
to afford even low quality freelancers. The joins are also not very targeted.
Most of the clients actually want to target/ hire low quality freelancers. I
think most of time clients want to joke with the freelancers and post a project
to steal the concept how a projects works. Most of the clients don’t have
enough project awarding rate or hiring score (99% of them have below 50% hiring
rate).
Complicated working options for freelancers than elance – There are really complicated hiring and working
options. Just like elance – you just cannot hire a contractor and start working.
Even you can start working, you cannot let just working. The tools of upwork
just to make the things more unclear to clients. In upwork the team app is also
recording the no. of keystrokes, no of mouse hits, keyboard hits as well. So,
clients also have options to track your work, if any screenshot time span
doesn’t have any activity over 50% get ready to provide solid reason for that.
Take 10 days to process payments – Must required 10 days to process the payment and available as withdrawal.
Then you require more timeframe to reach to your hand. If you have very urgency
in getting payment simply not possible. In elance it available at the same
moment it released and then just 2 – 3 days to reach to your end.
Complicated reviewing process – The job
reviewing process is very bad. They have really extremely complicated reviewing
process and the job success score. How they calculate your job success score. No,
one doesn’t know very easily. They updated their job success score and change
it after every two weeks and don’t know what’s happening. Once I had job
success score rate 97% and then after a few months once they downed my job success
score to 85% and that was also with no notifications, no email and no
supporting solid reason for that. Suddenly it dropped. When I asked clarifications
they just told me that it cannot happen. We have the proper system to calculate
and then we put the job success score there. Though no contract ended and no
client left any score.
I don’t think
upwork will be successful. They just force a client to hire a top freelancer
because their system thinks he is the suitable for it. They don’t understand the
client’s job, clients requirement don’t pay any value to client willingness.
The client became convince with the top reviews/ feedback / job history of the
freelancer and then the freelancer started billing the client for money. Now ,
it is upto client to pay and get his job done properly and it is the duty of
freelancer to deliver the top quality work within the budget.
Lets see what
future kept for upwork.
Good Luck!!!!About The Author :
Myself Nirbanjyti das, an internet marketing specialist working in this field for 1 decaded.I have working in elance and odesk both in the past and achieved a great experince and sharing my point regarding the elance odesk merger and birth of upwork with you.
