What do you get when you mix unemployment, frugal consumers and Internet boredom?
One possible answer — Fiverr.com, a site that allows you to buy and sell tasks for $5.
The "gigs," all fixed at $5, range from the silly to serious. Among them: sending a nice postcard from Paris, burning a small paper effigy of your enemy, offers for breakdancing lessons, Photoshopping monsters into your family photos, coining that nickname you never got in high school, balloon animal instruction via Skype and even the penning of Italian love songs.
There's a flurry of more practical microtasks, too: CSS microbugging, social marketing, resume revising and PowerPoint editing help.
The company takes one dollar of the five. The full story is here and I thank Daniel Lippman for the pointer. Also via Daniel, here is a story about robots teaching English in South Korea.
I forwarded the robot story to my friend, she teaches in Korea right now and I think she’ll be terrified to hear our robot overlords will be taking over teaching our youths!! LoL Say goodbye to free speech when the robots take over: http://lawblog.legalmatch.com/2010/03/19/a-victory-for-free-speech-and-hilariously-bad-lawyer-advertisements/
Some of the services seem well priced, if you need the service, like competently translating a page of English to Spanish. After browsing the site for a bit, I don’t see much evidence that any of the gigsters are selling than a few gigs, so it doesn’t seem to be a business model yet. Most of the gigsters are young, high school or college kids, but a generation of underemployed/semi-retired baby boomers could use this sort of thing.
I checked out fiverr.com and it is a good site. There are funny stuff on there but there is also stuff that would be a steal for five bucks. It is nice to be able to get quality lessons on programming java for five bucks and hour. In today’s market I am surprised there isn’t more website like this one. Fiverr.com give the buyer more purchasing power making there money go further. The site also can help you with problems with almost anything technology related. I think five bucks is the price people are willing to part with very easily.
After getting burned by Fiverr, I started http://www.7freelance.com on my own, taking out all the negative of Fiverr, like 20% commission, holding money for 20 days and so on and poor customer protection. They actually expect you to say, it was just $5, I havent lost much.
As a worker, I wanted to get paid at least minimum wage, if I was doing a job that took an hour. Fiverr took $1 for commission and on top of that they diduct additional fees for withdrawal of the money you made. Plus paypal fee. Finally gives you about $3.77
We wanted to help people make $7 and no commissions taken out. People actually prefer paying $7 over $5. Go figure. Psychology of lucky seven I guess.
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