SYDNEY, April 20, 2015: By adding location to its matching algorithm, Freelancer.com integrates local jobs into its marketplace, providing a seamless local-hiring experience, while still retaining the same exceptional experience for online jobs.
Through the addition of location-specific data and matching, Freelancer.com, the world’s largest and most flexible online services marketplace is leveraging its 15 million strong user base to enter a brand new market – local services.
After selecting “hire” on the homepage, users are now prompted to choose if their job is location-specific or can be done anywhere online. If location specific information is selected, then they will be matched only with freelancers in their local area. This new and expanded hiring experience is consistent across all of Freelancer.com’s desktop and mobile products.
This allows Freelancer.com to expand its services marketplace into over 100 new location specific skills, related to location-based tasks (pick up & delivery), trades (electrician, plumber, builder), and professions (event management, catering).
“When you have the largest and most liquid online services marketplace in the world with over 15 million users, it is natural for us to expand our business to encompass location-specific tasks.” Freelancer.com CEO and Chairman Matt Barrie announced. “Now, a family in Delhi can hire a local electrician to fix the wiring in their bathroom, a business in London can hire a local events specialist to run their product launch, and a young professional in Sydney can hire a removalist to move houses – all utilizing our existing marketplace and products, such as our Milestone Payment system.”
Online services is already a huge market, with enormous future potential. McKinsey Global Institute has estimated that “160 million jobs, or about 11% of the projected 1.46 billion services jobs worldwide, could in theory be carried out remotely, barring any constraints in supply”. This has been calculated by Freelancer.com to represent at least $75 billion per annum in gross payments.
With the addition of local jobs, the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for the company is estimated to increase from $75 billion in GPV per annum to hundreds of billions per annum. In the US alone, the temporary labour market is estimated to be on the order of $100 billion. MBO Partners also found that in 2013 in the US there were 17.7 million independent workers which generated $1.2 trillion in total income per annum. Angie’s List estimates the home services industry, which includes electricians, plumbers, dog walkers and other manual labor, alone is worth $400 billion per annum, while others put it at $800 billion per annum.
The offering will be progressively rolled out market by market over Q2 2015.
About Freelancer®
Quadruple Webby award-winning Freelancer.com is the world’s largest freelancing, crowdsourcing and local services marketplace by total number of users and projects posted. Over 15 million registered users have posted 7.5 million projects and contests to date in over 850 areas as diverse as website development, logo design, marketing, copywriting, astrophysics, aerospace engineering and manufacturing. Freelancer Limited is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange under the ticker ASX:FLN.
