So I have been looking at some design freelancing websites for extra design to do in my free time. Yes I just cannot get enough :)
But they are absolutely ridiculous! I am disgusted. It is essentially slave labour!
The two main ones I have found are 99 Designs and oDesk. Both have different systems but both are plain ridiculous.
99 Designs has jobs posted from the clients with the monetary amount - which in most cases are reasonably priced. Fair enough. Except everyone competes and submits their design and then the chosen one gets the monetary amount. Meanwhile everyone else who spent time creating a logo for example gets nothing.
oDesk is worse than that. At least with 99 Designs the money is good; oDesk clients are slave drivers. One job I saw on there this morning was $5 (not $5 an hour - all up) for two entire website designs for different companies and before you got the job you had to do a trial! Are you kidding me! And then if you got the job you have to pay $1 something to oDesk. You left with less than $4!
Check out this clients sale history. And the poor people that think they should be thankful for this!
Hi Sammie,
ReplyDeleteI have spent some time with both system to comment.
I don't think that oDesk and 99 Designs should be lumped in the same basket.
While I have a lot of respect for the Melbourne based company behind 99 Designs. I see it as purely about speculative work. My way of thinking is that 99% of the time spec work is bad.
oDesk on the other hand is not really targeted at you. Imagine you live in India and locally would get paid the equivalent of US $4 an hour. Suddenly getting paid $5 to $10 an hour to work for someone on the other side of the world seems like a good thing.
Also most of the people less than $10 per hour offering work in skilled disciplines such as design are totally rubbish.
There are plenty of highly skilled and well established oDesk freelancers from the Philippines, India and Eastern Europe earning more than US $25 an hour which for them can be a very comfortable wage.
You should check out places like http://jobs.freelanceswitch.com/ for higher paying jobs if you thinking about online freelance work.
And apparently I have trouble writing full sentences. Lol.
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