Saturday, December 22, 2007
Elance changes
Elance has once again changed their rules, and not for the better.Originally, elance had a simple subscription service. You paid a yearly fee, and then you were able to bid on all projects that were posted to the site in your category. As elance grew, this system led to upwards of a hundred bids per project. In an attempt to cut down on the number of bids and make the process easier for buyers, elance changed their terms of service to limit the number of bids based on the subscription level of a provider. Although more restrictive, this new process had some of the effect they had intended and things seemed to stabilize.
Not anymore. Facing another crunch, elance has selected to change the bid system to connects, and severely restrict the number of connects that come with a subscription. Now, instead of having 240 bids per month, we have 15 connects. Fifteen.
It gets better. If a project has a higher budget, it costs more connects to bid. So a $1000 dollar project costs a provider 3 connects instead of 1.
Mnd you, spending the connect does not mean you win the project, It means you have bid to win. elance's bid to award ration still sits at around 5-10% for design, so you can see that the odds of a provider winning a project are rather slim if one goes with the fifteen connects.
Oh, you can have more connects. For a low, low cost of .50 cents per connect.
By the way, if you have more than one subscription, such as one in graphic and one in web, you still only get fifteen, not thirty.
I think the net result of this move will allow the largest earners to continue business as they have, as with a larger revenue stream they will be able to continue to purchase additional connects. But for the smaller provider, it means lean times, having to pick and choose from the smallest projects, trying to conserve their connects and spread them out for the better chance of winning the project. No sense only making five bids on heavily competitive projects than fifteen on the projects that fall through the cracks.
The jury is still out if this will be a boon for elance or just create a new set of unforeseen troubles for the company. But it definitely means leaner times for a lot of freelancers that relied on elance to fill in the margins of the work schedule.
Labels: Anti-Fun, Got a Permit for Breathing, Modern Life
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