THE GROWTH OF THE FREELANCE WORLD
It’s a hoorah for freelancers, sit –at-home entrepreneurs and info-preneurs, bloggers, vloggers, self-published authors, ghost-writers, and the new generation of online sellers as they gradually gain attention from the mainstream companies and make enough income to live the kind of life they have always dreamt of living.
The mainstream are often faced with nightmares, not from thoughts of losing present clients—for they still hold a ridiculously high percentage of the big clients, rather, from the thought of losing small and medium scale businesses that may later become.
The business world is taking more shape, and no sooner that it seems volatile will it become stable, and once again, the pomp of the big-boys who charge seven figures for services such as research are scorned back with the small guys who comfortably charge three to four figures and bag hundreds of clients in a year.
Sites like Truelancer and Fiverr boast of millions of freelancers—this isn’t surprising or miraculous in any sense, what is miraculous is that freelance platforms like these also boast millions of clients—or sellers, as they are called. Therefore, it seems that above the geographical and national bias, a sizable percentage of the freelancers still get jobs. On Fiverr and Freelancer combined, a gig is completed in a second; that is, over eighty six thousand gigs are completed in a day—86400 gigs to be precise. If each gig is given to a separate freelancer, a million freelancers will get freelance jobs in less than thirteen days—mathematically, 86,400 gigs in twelve days equals 1,036,800.
Freelance platforms have given jobs to millions of young and skillful youths who are getting the golden chance of getting paid for their work. A website designer in India doesn’t have to rely only on the population within his locality to pay little for his skills. He can register on Upwork, and if his campaign is done right, he can earn over ten thousand dollars in a year.
Other than Freelancers, social media has also opened opportunities for daring and creative young men and women to make very good income within their homes—as long as they have a laptop and a good internet connection. The biggest earner on You Tube in 2018 isn’t even a teenager, yet he earned over a hundred million dollars within a year. That’s ten million dollars per month—this figure is higher than the earning power of a founder of a public company worth a billion dollars. It’s incredible. The world produces more multi-millionaires who started their dreams with less than a hundred dollars.
The hoorah is a big one and it is safe to say with all conviction that it has become quite erected, and it is a trend that isn’t going anywhere; however, just like every other good thing, there are a few biases with the freelance world, with the most prominent being the race-bias.
Freelancer from Africa and some parts of Asia complain of neglect from clients. A U.K client seem to feel more comfortable giving a gig to a less qualified and expensive freelancer from the U.K than another from Kenya or South-Africa. It’s difficult for an Indian to get a writing gig, whereas, it is much easier for him to get a tech-related gig. This is because Indians are not native English speakers; but when it comes to tech, they have proved to the world to be one of the best, even before people started talking about “freelancing.” There is hope, however, that the bias will be noticed enough and be constructively tackled.
In conclusion, things can only get better, as the world is finally reaching a point where poverty can be alleviated through a global outreach between clients and online service renderers.
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