How Do We Fix Freelance Gig Platforms?
An article from Forbes reveals that more than one third of workers in the United States, 57 million people, are in the freelance gig economy.
Once deciding to quit their 9 to 5s, many people are finding freelance clients through platforms such as Upwork and freelancer.com.
If you don’t have much professional networking experience, and the marketing of your freelance business is still slow going, then freelance gig platforms like this are a brilliant tool. With a few clicks, you can easily find clients and companies that need your skillset and experience and they can find you. You can potentially make thousands of dollars, or your whole salary, this way.
However, these platforms are broken. There are reports of clients running scamming freelancers out of free work, freelancers losing out on jobs because a competing freelancer submitted a lowball offer, and issues with platforms taking such a large chunk out of your revenue.
If so many more people are going to join the freelance workforce, freelance gig platforms are only going to become more important. For these platforms to be sustainable, we need to fix them and make some major changes to the way that they are run.
