How Fiverr killed the market for freelance writers
Jan 12
This just in this morning from Patrick Lambert, a freelance writer in Montreal:
I joined (Fiverr) in early 2011, and was active on the site for over a year, until late summer 2012, when my sales went down to basically nothing. [...] (Because) as more people from overseas came on-board, they quickly competed in ways I couldn’t.
Here are some examples…
I will write 25 unique articles in any niche you give me for $5
I will create 10 unique articles on any keyword or topic
I will professionally write unique top quality 20 page ebook
Since it takes a certain amount of time at a minimum to write a 500 word article, Patrick points out these people can’t be making more than 60 cents an hour. You can’t live on that in the U.S. or Canada.
But wait.
As it turns out, these giggers aren’t writing original or unique articles. They scrape content from the web and spin it or add “stop word” encoding so the article will pass Copyscape. So they may actually be doing about 20 minutes of work for $4 net, which isn’t bad at all if you’re in India or Thailand.
It’s an unfortunate state of affairs that has eliminated English-speaking freelance writers from the Fiverr market. Because why would anyone buy your gig for one original article when they think they can get 10 or 20 instead?
Practically all the writers we profiled in Fiverr’s early days have moved on to other venues. This is a situation Fiverr could remedy, if they put their minds to it. You’d think they would. The “unique article” con is tarnishing the Fiverr brand.
As a freelancer you may not be able to make headway on Fiverr but there are still plenty of markets for your writing, such as Freelancing for Newspapers: Writing for an Overlooked Market
It’s easy to get discouraged, but I think sellers that provide quality services should be just as selective about their customers as customers are about their sellers. There’s no way that 25 articles cranked out after being tampered with are of high quality.
Also, it helps to have a niche. If you can provide quality content on a particular topic, you’re most likely to get more targeted (and loyal) attention while reducing the competition.
I’ve been on Fiverr for less than a month, however I’ve gained several repeat customers simply because I provided a quality service. I personally believe that if you’re losing customers because they are OK with having low quality content, then you probably didn’t want them as customers to begin with.