LinkedIn is launching its own service for freelancers

The Millennial Source
The Shadow
Published in
4 min readMar 1, 2021

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This appeared in The Millennial Source

The service will allow LinkedIn’s 740 million users to book freelance workers, tapping into a market that’s seen notable growth over the past year.

The career networking platform LinkedIn is preparing a new side-gig service called Marketplaces that will directly compete with similar platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr, according to a new report from The Information.

The freelance service, supposedly set to launch as early as this September, will allow LinkedIn’s nearly 740 million users to find and book freelance workers, tapping into a market that’s seen notable growth over the past year. LinkedIn’s massive user base could give it a leg up in its competition with other market leaders.

Marketplaces will likely replace ProFinder, a feature that already exists on LinkedIn that allows users to propose and apply for freelance jobs. As it stands now, the service charges a monthly fee for freelancers to read job proposals, but the income for the company is minimal.

The freelance market is a sizable one in the United States. In 2019, 35% of the total workforce was composed of Americans who had part-time or full-time freelance jobs. According to a study done by Upwork, it’s estimated that another two million Americans…

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