Size of online IT freelancing market
Hi,
I wanted to get some estimates on the size of online IT freelancing market.
This is basically the market where software and IT development work is carried out by contracting providers online remotely via a platform.
Vendors like odesk, rentacoder, elance, guru are some of the providers of such a platform.
I would like to start my estimation using odesk as reference:
If I look at oconomy statistics I see that around $ 5 - 7 million of work is outsourced per quarter, or say 20 - 30 million per year. Assuming odesk command 10% share of total online freelancing market overall size of this market would be somewhere between 200 to 300 million. Why I am attributing mere 10% to odesk is that lot of work on open source also happens in a freelancing kind of environment where developers connect remotely to contribute on a project which at times has paid sponsors.
Next is how many developers/providers are around the world working in this market. odesk statistics show there are 80-90K providers. I would assume roughly 2 - 2.5 times the same or say 200 K providers across the globe working on such projects. That amounts to mere 1000 - 1500 dollars per year per provider. Thus from this statistics it is clear that the size of projects posted in the freelancing market is indeed very small.
So question is to these platform providers as what can they do to ensure better quality and bigger projects gets contracted via there sites?
Even assuming $ 10 K dollar per year per developer this market can easily go to $ 2 billion, but for these we have to get some big names in the IT and software industry attracted to this space. We have to make them realize that there is a value proposition out here, so how can we do that? (again a question to these platform providers)
I hope to have some discussion on this, may be my assumption and analysis is all wrong and the actual market is much bigger or much smaller that what I mentioned.
So I would appreciate the thoughts of all you people out there.
Thanks and Regards
Sachin Mittal
Hi Sachin, Your analysis
Hi Sachin,
Your analysis based on oDesk is good. There are big projects posted on oDesk. But the point is we don't see any big buyer or even a big provider name in such kind of websites. I am not sure what is the reason behind this or what is holding such big buyers or providers to try this out.