The reason Upwork doubled fees...they're hemorrhaging cash. Prepare for more future hikes!

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I was astounded like many of you when upwork doubled their fees this month. Kinda shot themselves in the foot, because now people will be using the skype workaround where you message a worker and ask to talk to them on skype, then offer a direct paypal payment in lieu of going on upwork.

I know for fiverr people get around the skype trigger (not allowed to take business off fiverr) by typing in $kype.

Ran across this article that talks about the company that owned Elance was going down the drain and they bought Odesk out and merged them into Upwork (I liked Odesk and hated Elance; now I dislike Upwork). I guess the company started with 15 million and is worth 7 million now. Looks like the pricing raise they just had hurt them even more, which means look out for even bigger fees!

Here's a snippet of the article: "The merger was, by all means, a disaster. Pre-merger Elance had roughly 78,000 jobs listed, Odesk had approximately 48,000 showing without logging in. As of May 20 2016, the combined Upwork shows 85,579. The Elance community, which had 2/3rds the volume and a “higher end” community were forced to move to the “lower end” Odesk platform which was relabeled “Upwork” by new CEO Kasriel resulting in approximately 1/3rd of the jobs being lost from the combined entity- almost the same number that Odesk originally started with. A merger so badly executed that effectively one of the communities did not survive the churn and make it to the new entity.

But even the 85,579 jobs showing isn’t what it seems. The large majority of those jobs displayed are expired listings posted weeks, months and even more than a year ago. Upwork hides this by not letting customers easily browse past 5,000 listings.

In an awkward interview, Kasriel explained the fall in jobs,

“Historically, our pricing has been a flat service fee, and frankly, it hasn’t been ideal. If you think about it, for the short projects on our site, we incur a lot of costs, and as a result, in the traditional pricing, these projects were not profitable for us, and because they are not profitable, we haven’t been investing in growing the number of these projects”." 

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