The problem of dumping in freelancing. Dumping prices on freelance exchanges

From a freelancer's point of view, dumping is an integral part of the workflow, as there will always be someone who will agree to work for a meager pay. To understand in detail the topic of dumping in freelancing, we can consider two real-life examples.

1. There are two companies A and B. Both companies hire people for the same position, but in company A, management is willing to pay 30,000 rubles, and in company B, management pays only 20,000.

For an employee, company A is preferable, but do not forget that company B will also find a worthy employee for the same position, but by cutting wages by a third. This problem in freelancing is called "Jobseekers".

By the definition of freelancers, job seekers are individuals or companies, often intermediaries, who offer for work many times less than the acceptable barrier. For the first time the word “job seekers” appeared in the “No to dumping and slavery” community, which existed on the site www.free-lance.ru for 6 months and during this time managed to recruit 2,000 people.

The community was blocked due to ‘Violation of site rules’. Mass underestimation of the "Users attitude" indicator, imposing one's opinion on new users of the site, SPAM in personal messages. To be frank, the reason for the ban was the UNPROFITABILITY of the site administration, but more on that later.

2. If the first case was called job seeking, then case number 2 is dumping. In freelance jargon, dumping is an artificial lowering of prices by employees. That is, to put it simply, the workers agree to work "for food." Consider the chart:

Beginners are a harmless people who were previously:

• office plankton


• schoolboy


• a student who needs money


• etc.

Newbie freelancers are:

• women on maternity leave


• schoolchildren on vacation


• pensioners (this is not a joke)


• young average creative person

The most dangerous newcomers are schoolchildren, students, persons under 23 years old. They deliberately lower prices for:

• Quick money


• Portfolio content


• Getting a rating

Grabbing every penny project, they are sure that they hit the jackpot of their whole life.

If a good project comes across on their way, then they deliberately bring down the prices of previously unsubscribed freelancers.

According to my observations and the stories of customers, about 15 percent of them all pecked at tempting offers from newcomers. As a result, the money is paid to the freelancer, and the work received is of poor quality. The freelancer, of course, refused to complete it. As a result, the customer spends more, but gets a lesson for the rest of his life that cheap is of poor quality.

As a rule, you can write to such a freelancer that the prices for certain services are higher, or send him to get acquainted with the minimum price list (a price list compiled by the administrator of the anti-dumping community (me) on the site www.free-lance.ru, which managed to make a splash and gather around you a lot of grateful "listeners").

After familiarization, the beginner thanks and henceforth knows his own worth and starts from the price list.

In the worst case, the newcomer complains to the site administrators that he is being spammed.

Dumping and site administrators www.free-lance.ru

6 months ago, in the open spaces of freelance, a thematic community was created, the main goal of which was the fight against dumping.

• Drawing up a minimum price list for all types of freelance services


• Notifying newcomers that their price is lower than the real one


• Complete disregard for penny projects


• The omission of "karma" - the reputation of job seekers and dampers, as a result of which, in the column "user relations" one can observe a deep minus


• An invitation to the community of employers who were once job seekers.

In six months, a record number of people entered the community for such a period - more than 2,000.

Along with the growth of grateful people, the number of those who began to complain to administrators that their rights were being infringed, and someone left freelancing altogether, and, consequently, administrators lost potential buyers of paid services on the site, such as a paid account and others. Together with them, unscrupulous job seekers left, again - potential PAID customers.

After a lot of complaints from dampers and job seekers about our community, the community was closed in order not to give people a reason to discord and ignore low-quality projects.

When the community administration wrote collective and not only letters to resource administrators asking them to tell the “whole world” about the price list, ban penny projects, introduce paid registration, etc., the administrators shrugged their shoulders and answered: “If you don’t like the project, go by, but we won’t touch, otherwise blather - we will ban. ”

Conclusions: Freelancing is a struggle between good and evil, it is a sphere that is divided into.

On freelance exchanges like Upwork, Fiverr and Freelancer.com, you can order almost any service. Tasks are performed by people from various countries and often do it for a penny. The Atlantic journalist Alana Samuels wrote a column about the harm to the digital economy caused by such platforms and how to solve this problem.

Fiverr is one of the most popular platforms of its kind. You can find a wide variety of offers on it - someone is ready to write you a book “on any topic”, read the text in the voice of a famous politician, fill out a Tinder profile for you, or design a company logo. For such services, performers ask for only $5.

It is obvious why customers are so attracted to freelance exchanges - they can find competent performers who are ready to work for a small fee. On the platforms, you can track the progress of the task, evaluate freelancers, and in case of disagreement, contact technical support. Exchanges are also beneficial for freelancers themselves, especially for those who work outside the United States, because orders are paid in US dollars. Thanks to the rise of freelancing exchanges, some have been able to leave low-paying jobs in their home countries, and students and inexperienced people have had the opportunity to sell their services, get reviews, and grow their customer base.

In total, more than 48 million people are registered on the world's freelance sites. The digital economy can solve the problem of poverty in countries such as Malaysia and Nigeria, so there are special campaigns to train local residents to use freelance exchanges. It is planned that in 2020, 340,000 Malaysian citizens will earn their living by freelancing.

The number of digital workers continues to grow - in the past year, almost a quarter of a billion people started using the Internet for the first time, and more than half of the world's population has access to the network. The World Bank estimates that in 2016 the global online freelancing market was worth $4.4 billion.

Downhill race

“[Freelancing] has an overabundance of workers,” said Mark Graham, professor of internet geography at the Oxford Internet Institute. Graham and his colleagues conducted extensive research into the digital economy, interviewing hundreds of freelancers and examining data from tens of thousands of projects. They found that most of the customers were in wealthy countries like the US, and most of the performers were in countries like India, Nigeria, and the Philippines.

Freelance exchanges allow performers to choose customers who offer the highest wages, but more often things work differently - customers are primarily looking for people who are ready to work for nothing.

“The stakes are low, but that's how it works,” says Elena, a Serbian freelancer who works on the Fiverr platform. “The one who offers the least, he takes the order.”

For only $5, Elena is ready to translate a thousand-word text from Serbian into English, make a presentation, or write a “beautiful love letter.” Fiverr takes 20% of the proceeds, part of the money goes to the PayPal commission, and as a result, Elena receives about $3 for each service.

The rules of different freelance sites are slightly different. For example, on Fiverr, customers and performers correspond with each other anonymously and cannot exchange email or phone numbers - this rule was introduced so that people communicate only on the platform and it does not miss out on profits. Anyone can sign up on Fiverr and start offering their services right away - no need to provide their real name, upload a photo, and verify their level of education. Because of this, it is not always clear who exactly you are working with. I once commissioned a blog post from a freelancer named Deborah Hutton. In her profile, she had a photo of a smiling girl in glasses sitting at a laptop, and it was indicated that Deborah was a journalist by training. But when I looked it up online, it turned out to be a stock image, and Deborah Hutton was a Vogue journalist who died in 2005.

Photo: /

The Internet gives all employees equal rights - and the customer cannot find out who is actually performing his task. Some are attracted to this - for example, illegal immigrants who earn their living online while in another country, or older people who can hide their age.

But there are also disadvantages - everyone is paid the same and the freelancer's place of residence is not taken into account, so it is difficult for Americans and residents of other developed countries to compete with performers for whom low wages will be quite acceptable.

Monica Taylor lives in the US and works as a parapsychologist on Fiverr. She used to sell them for $65-85 on Facebook and Pinterest, and then she discovered a freelance exchange and thought she could expand her client base that way. However, other freelancers offered parapsychology services for as little as $5. Despite the low pay, Monica still decided not to refuse such an opportunity (the girl planned to raise the cost of services later, when she had enough clients). Monica got new customers, but when she raised the price from $5 to $15, they stopped using her services. Now Monica has returned to other platforms. “If I made my living on Fiverr, I would live under a bridge,” she said.

Freelancers know that if they complain or ask for higher pay, customers will easily find replacements from millions of applicants. They perceive each other as competitors and try not to contact.

The bright sides of freelancing

Of course, many people have had positive experiences in the online digital economy. Graham and his colleagues spoke with Manila-based professor Arvin, who went freelancing because of the low salary at the university. Arvin started offering SEO services and soon started earning three times more than his last job - about $600 per month with 25-30 hours of work per week. Another Vietnamese freelancer earns $8 an hour, four times what he made at his previous bank job. Thanks to a part-time job on a freelance exchange, he began to travel and buy expensive things.

Photo: /

Janazib Malik, 24, from Pakistan, was able to earn about $5,000 on Fiverr in two years by creating PowerPoint presentations for startups who need to speak to an investor. Malik answered various questions about the freelance marketplace on Quora and became a guru among local freelancers. He later launched NerdsHD.com, a blog about the digital economy, where he began selling the services he provided on Fiverr, but at a higher price. With a freelance client base and online fame, Malik was able to start his own business.

But not everyone is lucky

Orders are so fickle that freelancing alone is not enough to earn a living. Freelancer Kim-Lu shared a story about how the customer first reduced the price to $6, and then canceled the project altogether. When the girl found a new job for which they offered $4 an hour, she did not dare to ask for more, in fear that she would again be left without a job. A study of one European freelance exchange showed that the majority of its users have never received any part-time work.

Some freelancers have simply resigned themselves to accepting the lowest possible rate to get any work. Someone has long believed that freelancing is just a part-time job, not a full-time job.

Professor Graham believes that freelance platforms can still fix the current situation with wages. He proposes the creation of a global union that will monitor compliance with international labor standards.

But for now, the “cream” of the freelance community is in the most advantageous position. And it is quite possible that in the future the Matthew effect will overtake the gig economy - that is, the most successful workers will live better and better, and for everyone else the situation will only worsen.

Freelancing is gaining more and more popularity every day, and with it the number of people wishing to join the ranks of remote workers is growing. Naturally, there are not enough expensive and good customers for all, which means that the only way out for newcomers is to reduce prices. We will talk about such a phenomenon already familiar to freelancing as dumping, which became the result of a sharp increase in the number of freelancers.

For those who are unfamiliar with this overseas word, I will explain it more clearly: dumping is a financial process in business that allows you to attract customers by offering a lower price than a competitor. To put it even more simply, some freelancers, in order to get an order and break through to the top, deliberately underestimate the cost of their services in order to get new clients. Alas, dumping has its own chain reaction, so it is worth lowering prices for one performer, as another immediately lowers it in order to outbid a competitor's offer. If you dig into freelance exchanges, you can, for example, find copywriters who are ready to write 1000 characters for 10 rubles or designers who make one-page pages for 1000 rubles. With all this, it is worth noting that the work performed by these freelancers is very high quality and competent.

All this makes me wonder and ask one question: why does a person not appreciate his work so much and is ready to work almost for food? I understand when the finished content looks terrible, the texts are full of errors, the site is made in terrible colors with incomprehensible fonts, but for the most part dumping freelancers produce quality material. One way or another, only temporary workers are subject to dumping, including mothers on maternity leave, students, and schoolchildren. Their goal is to get more money by increasing the amount of work done. These freelancers have a short-term interest in making money, and in this regard, they only think about how to get income faster, albeit through lower prices. At the same time, practice shows that such workers do not linger on freelance for long, but their “business lives on” even after leaving.

And yet, finding a dumping artist who does really high-quality work is very difficult. At least, because a smart and educated freelancer knows the price of his services, and by creating high quality content, he will not be so stupid as to charge mere pennies for it.

In conclusion, I would like to turn to customers who still hope that for a low price you can safely get something worthy. Stop lying to yourself! If you are looking for a good professional who can do something "wow", then be prepared to pay the appropriate amount for it. When you save on a freelancer, you are stealing from yourself. After all, sales, attendance and, in general, all indicators of the resource depend on how your site is made, what text content it contains, how well the optimization was done. Dumping is suitable for a seasonal sale in the clothing market, but not for freelancing, designed to help you find buyers for this very sale.