A recent internal analysis at oDesk yielded some pretty interesting trends within our own network.

We were looking at the total hours worked by all providers and were segmenting the hours by various different criteria. One of the most startling trends we found was the growth in hours worked by providers from the Philippines.

The number of hours worked in Philippines has grown 4x in just 4 months.

The amazing thing to us is the fully viral expansion of work that’s going on in this country. We have not changed anything about our acquisition strategy in the Philippines so this is true word-of-mouth growth. Kudos to the providers that are driving this rapid expansion.

Here’s a few top providers:

While the US economy might be going into recession, I’m bullish on the oConomy.

We’re excited to announce the launch of the “oConomy”, a feature that publicly shares data from the oDesk network on hourly wages, feedback, jobs, and certification tests. We scoured through our internal database in order to offer a valuable resource for both buyers and providers to understand global trends and lead to more successful remote work relationships.

The oConomy summarizes trends based on record $22.5 million (and counting!) of work completed on oDesk. The oConomy data covers more than 1,600,000 hours of work completed by over 47,000 providers from over 90 countries.

One of the first things we wanted to do when analyzing all of the data was to provide a helpful world map with details on service providers by country. For buyers - it can be intimidating to select candidates for their job and we hope the Google Maps mashup helps shed some light on the hiring situation. For providers - we hope this map can help set expectations and serve as a helpful comparison point for their individual rates and skills against their peers.

Among some of the other insights offered in the oConomy:

• Indonesian Providers Earn Highest Average Feedback Scores (for countries with over 100 feedbacks)
• The Average oDesk Pay Rate Is $14/Hour
• Experience Is A Strong Predictor Of Job Performance

Here are just some of the many things you can see in the new oConomy:

Top ranked provider companies on oDesk. The current top 10 are:

ISS Art
Impinge Solutions
SoftProdigy
SOFTREACTOR LLC
InterLink
Aarthika
UshaTech
Waverley Software
DevelopmentMill
Galindo Consulting Group

And lots of charts on every subject…

- Global hourly rate trends by week.

- Global distribution of provider rates.

- Feedback trends by Years of Experience.

- Number of Jobs posted by Type.

- Certification Test Statistics.

- Rankings of Individual Providers.

- Country List including Feedback Scores.

See all of the oConomy.

And even more data on oDesk’s growth trends. A few previews:

We’re hopeful that sharing this data will help everyone out there learn more about the global economy by garnering insights from the slightly smaller oConomy. We look forward to continued growth fueled by our dedicated users and encourage all to comment on the data and maps that you see here to foster meaningful discussion about these global trends.

Much has been published recently about the decline of the US dollar and the reverse flow of jobs back to the US from popular offshore outsourcing hotspots including India and China.

It made me curious to see the trends at oDesk. We have providers all over the world, and should be able to see this trend if it’s really happening.

So here it is:

Looks to me that while the entire market for remote contract labor is growing, the United States is possibly growing most rapidly over the last couple quarters.

When people think of outsourcing, they often think of India. Or Russia. Perhaps the Philippines, or Bolivia.

When oDesk was founded, the idea was to connect small- to medium-sized businesses around the world with providers worldwide who could provide IT services at competitive rates. All around our site are images of globes and mentions of the words “global,” “international,” “worldwide.” Certainly a great number of our providers are international.

So it came as a surprise when we looked at recent data and discovered that U.S.- and Canadian-based providers are the fastest growing group on oDesk (when these two countries are added together).

How did we measure this?

We looked at the number of providers working over a set time period grouped by country. When we last looked at this data, the U.S. held spot number two in terms of the number of timesheets submitted by providers. Add the U.S. and Canada together, and bam, you’ve passed India.

What’s interesting, though, is then to look at the number of hours providers worked each day. Our providers in Asia continue to log in over 50% of the total hours logged each day, while U.S.-based providers log a lower percentage. What this suggests is that while providers in the U.S. are quickly joining our network, they are likely supplementing their incomes with jobs from oDesk (and thus not working a full workday on our site), while providers in Asia, including India, are more likely to be working full-time for oDesk projects.

Still, as U.S.- and Canadian-based providers continue to accrue feedback and work history on oDesk, I wonder whether they will slowly begin to switch to becoming full-time freelancers and we’ll thus see a growth in the number of hours logged by North American providers. We’ve already got some full-time North American-based freelancers on our site — take Keith S., for instance — who’ve left typical jobs and have never looked back.

What do you think? Do you see U.S. as the next outsourcing hub?

This week we reached a major milestone in the marketplace - $10M has been spent on outsourced technology jobs through oDesk!

We’re very excited about the news and we know we have our buyers and providers to thanks for this achievement, so thank you!

Michael Arrington and Rafe Needleman both covered the news, about which we’ll be sharing more details on Monday. Stay tuned!

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Abid Mohsin

Lots of people are interested, O’Reilly too! So we decided to partner and create cool visualizations and maps of the skills, rates and work happening within the oDesk global economy. Check out the first things to come out of our partnership on our beta staging server:

http://beta.odesk.com/economy/

“As business moves online in the Web 2.0 era, we have access to an array of new data sets about our business activities. Using these newly available sources, the O’Reilly Radar team has developed new techniques to analyze and visualize emerging technology trends. We’ve worked with Amazon to analyze data on technology book sales, with Simply Hired to analyze online tech job listings, and with Technorati to analyze blogs. Now we’re pleased to partner with oDesk to get access to their data on global supply and demand for technical projects and programmer hourly rates, to find out what’s hot and what’s not in technology,”

… says Roger Magoulas, Research Director at O’Reilly. Read the entire press release here.

Here’s are two visualizations to get you guys started:

See all of them at http://beta.odesk.com/economy/

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Abid Mohsin

An oDesk provider posted a comment on the last entry about bonus payments stating that he would prefer a raise in his hourly rate instead of a bonus. I’m glad he asked this question. Many oDesk buyers have also rewarded providers with raises.

Here’s how the numbers stack up for 2006:

• 245 raises awarded in 2006
• Average raise: approx. $2.10 per hour
• Average raise (percentage): approx. 20%
• Average oDesk hours on assignment before raise: 145 hours

As everyone knows, it’s hard to hire and retain top talent. Bonuses and raises are 2 of the mechanisms a buyer can use to retain top talent.

For buyers: I recommend treating each oDesk provider as you would treat one of your own employees. If you decide that a raise is in order, you can issue a raise on an active assignment by going to the My Assignments tab, clicking View next to the active assignment, and then select Increase Hourly Rate. You can then issue a raise to that provider.

Thanks,

Josh Breinlinger

Many oDesk buyers have rewarded providers with bonus payments for exceptional work.

A few statistics on bonuses:

• Biggest bonus payment: $1,200
• Smallest bonus payment: $20
• Average bonus payment: $250

When bonuses have been awarded:

• Early completion of project
• Exceptional contribution to project
• Annual bonus
• Birthday gift

How bonuses have been used:

• A bonus awarded to an affiliate was used to have a dinner party for the team
• A bonus awarded to a freelance provider was used to buy a new computer
• A bonus awarded to a freelance provider was used to buy his child some birthday gifts

If you’re a buyer and would like to give your provider a bonus, submit a help ticket (click Help in the upper right of any page) and oDesk will process the bonus along with the provider’s next monthly payment. Please include in the help ticket the provider’s name and the bonus amount. There is a 10% payment processing fee added to the bonus amount.

Thanks,

Josh Breinlinger

First, I want to thank all of the oDesk users for your active participation in the launch of our feedback system. We’re proud to make the system fully public for the first time starting today.

To go along with the launch, I thought I’d share with you some of our interesting findings from the first two months of feedback scores submitted through the system. We’ve now been collecting feedback at the end of each assignment on a 1 to 5 scale (5 being the best) in six different categories including skills, quality, availability, deadlines, communication, and cooperation.

One of the first things we noticed is that there is a high correlation between feedback on assignments and the average pay rate for that provider. See for yourself.

I also wanted to show you a distribution of all of the feedback scores collected to date. Notice that a number of providers have perfect scores on feedback. If the above chart is any indication, these providers with perfect 5s may have very lucrative opportunities ahead of them.

One last important note. I would like to remind all users to be thoughtful when leaving feedback. Your rankings and comments will have a profound impact on the person you are evaluating, and it’s important that you provide careful assessments of performance.

Josh Breinlinger

We believe that more information will help our users make better decisions. We have been constantly pushing out more information, both on the public website and in the user-only My oDesk application.

Recently, we had a question on our Community forums about the Provider Rate box on the homepage, asking for some very relevant information. While we figure out how to push this information to our website and make it real-time, I wanted to post the histogram of the Number of Active Providers, by Hourly Rate range. (Click the image to open full size in a new window).

Also, be sure to check out the Pay Rate Visibility table in the Community, showing active assignments and their hourly rates.

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Abid