Freelancer.com Pays $3.2M To Buy Digital Marketing Marketplace, Warrior Forum | Hacker News Reader

Freelancer.com Pays $3.2M To Buy Digital Marketing Marketplace, Warrior Forum

techcrunch.com

38 pointsmalditojavi64 comments

I'm sure that Freelancer.com did their due diligence, but as a mere user of this and other marketing forums I don't see how this valuation makes sense. The site's primary source of revenue is the percentage it takes from WSO sales - "Warrior Special Offers". These are normally rehashed guides with such useful information as how to put Adsense on your site, with titles like "Make $300/day on Autopilot!". WSO's are the butt of jokes on other Internet marketing forums, as they are usually nonsense. Some other forums actually have sections dedicated to quickly throwing together useless WSO's with attractive titles, creating fake reviews, and getting them sold through Warrior Forum.

Definitely not an acquisition I would have made.

As someone who got wayyyyy too heavily involved into the whole "internet marketing" scene a few years back, I can confirm the sentiments above.

In my eyes, Freelancer just simultaneously paid millions of dollars for an obnoxious digital wasteland while devaluing their own brand by associating themselves with these clowns.

I can honestly say I have never, and will never, use Freelancer. Especially now.

As if they weren't devalued enough by their habit of accepting completely illegal and immoral projects (i saw tons of requests for filipino camgirls and carding/cracking activities)..

Well that's a bit close minded. You may have missed the fact that WF is now under new management.

Hey do you recon http://www.BlackHatWorld.com will be bought out next? I hope not as they're have a conference this year which is going to be epic! So Freelancer back off from our beloved BlackHat World! But i wish you all the best with your new venture.

They've already been bought and sold a few times before. Their offices are based in the UK now, I believe..

Thanks. No plans to buy BHW, I was just teasing the people in the thread there.

Certainly there is room for improvement. It's a marketplace right now without any of the key features of a marketplace, like reputation and feedback. We've going to change that.

Agreed, my reaction to this acquisition is 'what the...?'

I cannot imagine what they think they just paid $3 million for.

Talking about marketing forums, any good suggestions for social media marketing discussions?

The problem with forums and websites like these is that it attracts a very strong groupthink. Look at http://www.inboung.org or http://growthhackers.com/ - they both have a very strong element of groupthink. I think that the best places would be somewhere like Reddit (where subscribers are more heterogeneous because they subscribe to other forums too) or a Google Plus community.

Can't recommend any off-hand though.

I visit Inbound.org. To be honest, after awhile you'll see the same stories/thoughts pop up over and over. It's also more of a feed than a discussion group like HN.

Thanks - I use inbound, but didn't know growthhackers :)

PS there's typo in inbounG

I once joined Freelancer.com. Oh boy, what an experience it was. First off, there is a free plan for freelancers, but you should be paying ~$24 to get things going.

The second is charging money for tests, charging money for showing up as featured, and various other tactics to get money out of freelancers. I moved out as soon as I could.

Where did this $24 number come from? It's free to sign up and bid on projects and we charge a 10% commission for freelancers on a free plan only when you accept.

What's wrong with a fee to make a project featured? Ebay does this.

We charge for tests so people don't game them by writing down all the answers.

/non-related rant ahead

From a perspective of person who is (pro)actively looking for more work, freelancer.com is full of projects along the veins of "write me some software". It does not make sense to even bother applying to projects like that, as the time spent writing an application letter exceeds potential income.

~6 years ago I did a fair number of small projects on rentacoder.com - the quality of average project description was much higher (did they do any vetting on incoming projects?).

odesk.com on the other hand has a lot more projects whose authors understand a thing or two about how software development works (i.e. reasonable project description among other things).

Hi fest

I'n the Chief Executive of Freelancer.com.

The employers from RAC are all on Freelancer - and they are a lot more active than they were on the old site (which had a use interface from 1995 and was very difficult to use).

Regards Matt

The difference is that RAC protected both the interest of the coder and the buyer. Freelancer seems to be only interested in taking money from both sides.

If a buyer cancel his credit card used to pay for a project, the coder is not protected in any way. Freelancer support will simply send the coder to the TOS :). In other words the escrow payment is not guaranteed by Freelancer.

None of the freelancer sites protect against credit card chargebacks.

Try Elance :). The escrow is guaranteed for most projects.

Same goes for oDesk if you work by the hour.

Read the fine print on those "guarantees".

Hi Matt - I'm an employer from RAC and quite frankly I've hated freelancer ever since you acquired vworker.

I had so many "points" from my rac account usage I could buy time to skype call the freelancer CEO - so I did - and it was never fulfilled, even after me trying to contact support about it multiple times.

The gamification angle? please it just gets in the way (although the new site design it's less obnoxious)

The quality of freelancers is garbage and freelancer.com just doesn't have the same level of targeting rac/vworker had to weed out the useless people.

Sorry for such a negative post, I could say worse, but it's just been very painful experience for me ever since that acquisition. To the point where I barely post jobs anymore and find alternate ways to hire.

Jarrad, what's your username? I get a notification for the Skype calls and I do them all the time. I am happy to look into that and line that up.

You are incorrect about the quality of the freelancers and the dominant ones on the site are all ex-RAC.

You're going to need to name names if anyone's going to believe you. I've only seen ONE employer from RAC at your scamtablishment. Perhaps exaggeration is your strong point?

Ah, I know who you are now. We had a conversation when we acquired RAC because you wrote that book "Outsourcing Through RentACoder" and were upset we shut the site down.

We acquired 2.5 million users from RAC. Your comment is ridiculous, to say the least. And no, I am not going to mention specific employers, that's also ridiculous.

Man you can't be a very busy CEO if you keep popping up on forums all the time.

Freelancer is terrible for hiring people compared to Odesk, just like Warriorforum is a bunch of "guru's" are trying to sell you ebooks claiming you will make $1352523 a day for "only $79". If the method was that good, why aren't you doing it yourself?

This thread is a good laugh about the sale: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/blackhat-lounge/66...

I am both very busy and also care about user feedback. This is why I participate in the forums. I am also probably the only CEO in my industry to do so, so you have to give me a little bit of credit for that.

Yes the BHW thread is quite funny, I even appreciate feedback from 15 year olds.

I've done a little bit of work on Freelancer, and I did some work on RaC years ago - you just have to pick carefully. With the low-quality projects, there's also alot of low-quality developers, who copy and paste the same response to every project (are are often front accounts for development sweat shops). If you're in the same area as the project owner, and can write up a decent proposal (meaning you spent 2 minutes reading the project description and 5 minutes writing why you're best) you can win a large amount of work.

There are alot of projects where you can tell the project owner is "just outsourcing it" and thinks they'll get $25,000 of dev for $250. The overall volume is high enough, however, that you can find some quality gigs.

What I do have a problem with is nickle-and-diming the site does, especially with regard to their "tests". For instance, the ColdFusion test is probably 8 years old, and pretty embarrassing. (and despite some attitudes to the contrary, the language is quite current) Even "modern" tests like the HTML 5 test seem off with regard to content covered. They almost seems as if they were written using $25 contractors off the site.

The tests are optional. We charge for them so people don't cheat. We crowdsource the QA of tests, among other things. The Cold Fusion test is probably rarely done so I can't attest to the quality of it.

Why do you even take tests though? I took one when I joined back in 2010, but since then I haven't taken a single test. It's a waste of time.

Just because. I did like a little bit of work for $50 (basically just a "rails new" with a theme the project owner purchased), which doesn't move the needle, so thought I'd take a few to supposedly boost my credibility. The fact that they're a waste of time doesn't change the fact that they're pushing a borderline-scammy and low-quality product within their offering.

Took a test or two because the other bidders have that to show. I assume they create a few accounts and copy over the answers. Some of the questions were so old and irrelevant I didn't even come close to what the other users scores were, so I couldn't even show it in my profile.

Completing tests and getting the accreditation greatly increases the earnings of freelancers.

From the contractor PoV odesk (and maybe others as well) really sucks - rates are rather low. I've seen quite experienced engineers applying with rates in $15-30/hr range. And clients hiring history also shows that they are cheap.

From my experience, it is much profitable to stay out from these sites and search/apply to remote jobs independently - you get by order of magnitude higher pay.

I work as a Rails consultant exclusively on oDesk. How do you guarantee payment when jobs are found independently? Who's to say you aren't scammed out of money you're owed especially if you're not even in the US (or client country)?

You can't. And you shouldn't trust some John Doe and deliver the full solution upfront. I personally look for long-term tasks from "legitimate" companies. After some initial collaboration, you and the company naturally begin to trust each other. E.g. I'm paid hourly, but I don't use any control mechanism for that (like that odesk screensnapper and keylogger, ridiculous...). I just state how many hours I worked for some task and that's it.

If I were a web developer, I definitively apply for many remote web dev jobs you can find on HN's Who is Hiring thread. Try next month - and double your odesk rate.

I'll definitely try that, by the way - you don't happen to be looking for a full-stack Rails developer would you? :) Native english, expat from boston. I'm looking for a long term commitment project at the moment (40hrs/week).

Not me, sorry. I'm still on the contractor side of the life so far :)

You can also find bunch of Rails jobs at WeWorkRemotely. I'm for C++/core engineering jobs, which are quite rare in REMOTE space.

> like that odesk screensnapper and keylogger

Wait, what? Can you expand on that because if it's what it sounds like oDesk should be on every freelancers' shit list.

You open an application that measure keyboard and mouse activity and takes a screenshot of your desktop every ~10 minutes. Personally I like it. Guaranteed payment and no hassle over time tracking. I just work and get paid, what's not to love? I don't even need something like HarvestApp or PaydirtApp. I just work.

And if activity (nbr of keypresses and clicks) is below certain threshold (50%?), payment is not guaranteed.

You may want to look at sites with curated projects, like LetsWorkshop.com or Gun.io.

I believe Freelancer makes you give a credit card or a down payment before accepting bids.

That's incorrect.

You need to turn the paradigm around frankly, and hire through these sites rather than bid for work in a big pond.

I make a living off oDesk and the merge had me worried for a bit but so far it's been business as usual.

Haven't the two merged?

Yeah, they have. That's the other reason I am referring to rentacoder.com in past tense- or at least I think I am ;>

" Freelancer.com, which was founded back in 2009, has acquired several companies over the years — including tech freelance jobs site vWorker/RentACoder and IT marketplace Scriptlance, both in 2012. More recently (this March) it picked up Polish freelance marketplace, Zlecenia.przez.net. "

They're buying everything http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/freelancer-buys-warrior-for...

The last time I checked Warrior Forum was basically a marketplace for scammsters scamming newbies and selling scam paraphernalia. Long term value? Make 50.000 bucks in 10 days and get the Ultimate Master Traffic Money Maker for free!

I'm always amused by these Internet Marketers selling Internet Marketing Strategies to Internet Marketers. The whole site is basically an enclosed ecosystem of people selling and buying each others stuff.

That's not the case, but it could use a reputation system.

Somebody needs to make an elance, odesk, freelance competitor that is private - contractors or companies need to apply and be pre-vetted to be on the site for design/dev and projects posted are above a minimum budget threshold.

A country specific version of freelancer was an idea after I couldn't get a gig against every other third world country bidding on what seemed to be the same project with multiple accounts. Since it seems there were few and far American accounts bidding compared to other countries, "American only" struck me as something that would be useful as a developer. Though, I'm pretty sure people go there to pay insanely cheap prices. If they want to pay $100+ hour for experience and high quality, they would find a local company and meet with them. It's not like Angie's list where you're going to pay more or less the same price and you can filter out who you want to chose.

Good point. I'd say it would be very easy to find the talent and harder to attract the high paying projects.

I disagree with your $100+ hour statement. Sure, some people with $$ will try to hire locally, but we've gotten plenty of remote projects with high budgets.

I couldn't get a gig against every Indian and other third world country scamming the system with 10 accounts a piece

I'm not Indian, but some HN readers may find offensive that you equate Indian with scammer.

I've noticed that there is a big "can do" factor in Indian culture - until you find out there it's more like "never done it before but willing to try and you'll have to pay me for my time writing spaghetti-surprise code"

Edited. I didn't intend to be offensive. I feel the system is flawed and can be manipulated by anyone. The vast majority of bidders seems to be outside of America.

I feel the system is flawed and can be manipulated by anyone.

This is, unfortunately, true. You can however make some money on Freelancer if you offer quality and keep your prices at a medium level.

Proof that Barrie doesn't know what the hell he's doing. He just bought a bunch of scammers! But then, seeing how Freelancer.com is a scam in itself, it all seems very clear now.

Only enough to have the largest user base and the fastest growing site in the industry.. and the only publicly listed.

http://warriorforumsucks.com/ There is money to be made milking the vulnerable.

Not to diminish the work that goes into building a successful forum (most fail), but that's a nice out. With the right strategy it can even FU money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com