Comparing The main Freelancer Sites
British voiceover
Amongst a great many other guises, including the whole marketing thing, I am a voice artist. And it's also like a voice artist i use these freelance sites, but you can find many jobs on them all separated into categories and sub categories from design and digital art, to animation and proofing jobs.
British voiceover
So, whether you are a graphic designer or even a singer, bear in mind things i do and why I use these sites as my experience may differ from yours… I am seriously going to paraphrase here - don’t expect breakdowns in to the sites’ intricacies, you’ll can just trust my judgement go to get a nose around yourself. Right, blogs with long rambling intro’s never get read, everybody knows we see the title arehorrified to find that the first bullet point, so without further ado…
1. Elance 8/10
Elance has been well constructed and makes you feel most comfortable whilst deploying it. Incredibly, specially when you think about the amount of designers sort out these websites, lots of freelance sites have a tendency to feel dated, but Elance doesn’t. The UI is pretty slick as well as the features are much better than most. The take off dialogue box works well and finding are employed in your specific genre is straightforward. Little touches like having a store of one's demo files to easily attach to an offer on the mobile is great and having a massive limit to the amount of files you should use is ideal in addition to a massive individual file size limit. All of it works nice and smoothly, has got the freelancer at heart which is the main one Time passes to first. Top billing.
2. Skillpages 8/10
This can be gathering momentum and appears like the way ahead for freelancers. It’s essentially a social networking for work but without the horrible boundaries that produces LinkedIn so bloody frustrating. No fees in the first place, Skillpages let’s you advertise a position or role at no cost and similarly react to other’s jobs. They don’t wish to muscle in and hijack your chosen and preferred types of communication and let’s you handle your own personal business. It is without it’s own system to guard both sides in terms of the transaction, but let’s be truthful, that’s all a façade produced by these websites to warrant the fee and also to ensure that it stays all in-house. I’m fairly certain we are quite able to protecting inside ourselves a business transaction without resorting to a huge bro watching over us anyhow. Definitely look it over. One of many reason’s it’s not toppling every one of these other sites is always that it’s a bit around the quiet side and you also don’t have the immediacy of job turn-arounds as you use other services, but a quick look round immediately suggests it’s definitely getting busier and i also have now had sort out it and possess turned to it to advertise two roles - one which has been filled as well as the other wants good for applicants up to now. Let’s just hope there is something in place to avoid those darned spammers who hop on this sort of free loveliness. Go and join and provide it a chance.
3. oDesk 5/10
This really is favoured by India and the East. Like a guy perfectly located at the UK my bids can’t compete with the simply enormous level of bidders on the. This doesn’t mean I haven’t had work from oDesk however have a tendency to provide it with a wide birth. The favoured hourly rate just doesn’t suit the voice work either - in my line of work you must bid for an entire product. It’s filled towards the rafters with freelancers ready to work on an extremely low rate and individuals expecting work to be performed at this sort of rate. I find the bidding perplexing - you’ll use a guy seeking individuals to just work at a crazy $5 hourly for something then you’ll have people bidding a fee for your completed job plus some bid way over what he's requested - it’s somewhat of a mess and when I can, I overlook the site and venture in when times take time and effort. This is a very good functional website and it may suit certain genres and industries, but not mine, however, if you have a “voice talent” sub category, you should appeal to it.
4. Freelancer 5/10
It’s no Elance but it’s not very remote with regards to the site’s functionality but there are lots of little niggles. There's a strange “bid after which PM (personal message) your files” approach which makes no sense at all and merely contributes to people bidding with “Please see my PM for details.” If you've got the job list for the industry you can’t work off that list simply, you can’t open the jobs in tabs for instance. You are able to only acquire one file at the same time up to the client too. But perhaps most importantly you should be aware that Freelancer place their fee no matter whether you get paid or otherwise not. When challenged they'll explain how they may be merely acting as the “introduction” service and that the dealings between you and the employer aren't anything to do with them. That may be translated as “we don’t give an excessive amount a shit, as long as we take our lump from the transactions going on round here.” Should you win work for $1000 your account will immediately visit -$100 as Freelancer immediately place their 10% fee; in the event the employer gets cold feet, deletes his account and runs you're left with a $100 debt to Freelancer and ironically NO contact details for your guy who ran because Freelancer frowns upon sharing contact info! Why not a compulsory 100% escrow or why they can’t get their fee from your transaction, I don’t know. When it comes to withdrawing your hard earned money, if you wish to use Paypal they inexplicably charge you $1 for withdrawals in dollars and £1 ($1.60!) for withdrawing in GBP. Why the difference?! It’s suspiciously random (ie what's the fee for exactly? If it’s a cost on their behalf, then Freelancer should have one cost that's equal across all currencies). That’s anasty little sting inside the tail after your projects is completed and when you've got a large amount of transactions going on, specially when you have fees for each and every job, potentially a subscription for the service and Paypal’s own over-inflated fees on top, everything adds up. The profiteering runs right through the entire service and it’s score has suffered for doing this.
5. People Each hour 4/10
Hmm. They’re focusing on it. Still has one method or another to attend catch up nevertheless they have reached out for feedback in a big way (see the red feedback tab about the right side of each and every page). It doesn’t feel as old skool since it did a few months ago but someone seriously must acquire that logo; it feels as though an 80's supermarket! Apart from the aesthetics it has some major conditions that you can’t get passed. Personally as a voice artist as an example there's no “audio” category so jobs are strewn across categories including “design” or even “secretarial” but you are only able to bid in a tiny set of categories so I can’t even get to the jobs without fiddling with my categories! Whenever you bid for work you own an upload limit of the utterly ridiculous 2mb (it was 1mb up until a few weeks ago!) so when you are looking at showcasing media files - you’re stuffed, of course, if you link to a hosted file, the link isn’t even live leaving clients baffled. Plenty of these minor/major gripes make-up a large one; however they are taking care of it apparently.
6. Guru ?/10
I don’t understand how this has evaded me for so long however i have just discovered it and early indications are very positive. They don’t look uptight about you making contact from the website which can be refreshing. The threats from all of the aforementioned about venturing to get in touch on Skype, as an example, isn’t solving a challenge and is also very off-putting. I have to get good at Guru but so far it looks on the websites for with Elance and might eventually grow to be an everyday area for me; particularly because the web site is the first one to differentiate between men and women voice jobs (note to any or all freelancer sites please also do that, and differentiate between accents required and character or commercial work - it’s far deeper than just “voice talent” and would help us enormously).
Honorable Mentions
Office Cavalry A new comer to the scene. As the interface looks nice, the horrific stereotyped characters on the home page is enough to put anyone off and it’s dead quiet!
Freelance Just seen it whilst Googling - think it's got just launched. Looks like a brand new look and really quite promising but no apparent audio category (on the personal front). Is this PPH reincarnated?!
Google Will it trump all? It certainly can. Maintain a close eye on it; particularly becasue it is business elements get launched.