[wmal]

The article is based only on the stats of a single freelancing site. It may be big, but it still represents only a sample of the overall market data. We do not know how big the sample is and whether it represented the same percentage of the overall market size at the beginning and end of the reported period.

Only the first conclusion listed mentions Upwork. The rest sounds like it reports a general market trend.

The author says the data was provided by a company called Revealera, but doesn’t disclose he is a co-founder. It doesn’t affect the quality of the data by itself but I’m always careful to make conclusions from data presented this way.

I visited a couple of new job ads on Upwork and I found that:

1. The „hire rate” of clients is usually between 0 and 70%.

2. Upwork has an AI solution for clients that makes it very easy to post a new job. Meaning it is easier than ever to think about an idea, post a new „job” and forget about it, never hiring anyone.

[raincole]

I've tried to hire artists from Upwork. Anecdotally the experience sucked. I made it clear it's for sprite sheet game assets, but it quickly got flooded by applicants who clearly never have never drawn sprite sheets.

Event worse, about 15% of portfolios had stolen artwork. (I've been around for long enough to spot obvious stolen art, but I'm not a human google image search so the real rate might be much higher than 15%)

I ended up contacting an artist that I found on itch.io directly.

[ametrau]

Warning: you absolutely have to only allow certain countries to apply for jobs. The site works if you block India especially for most things.

[zrn900]

> The site works if you block India especially for most things.

The site works if you don't try to get anything done by paying $5/hr to anyone. I have gotten jobs done by people from India, Serbia, and other places. I just chose sufficiently reputable freelancers and paid them what they are worth and it worked perfectly fine in all cases. There was no magical difference between freelancers from the US and freelancers from other countries in the same price ranges.

[bdcravens]

Many of the issues with Upwork came well before AI posting:

- thinking they can get Facebook built for $300 and/or sticker shock when they select "US only" freelancers

- being overwhelmed with low-quality/spammy responses (agencies copy-and-pasting, etc)

- frustration with communication barriers (whether language or time zone)

- the need to pre-pay $X to hire someone