Decline in amount of work
I have been using the PPH site as a copywriter for 10 years and am a top-rated freelancer. However, really oddly, projects coming in have declined markedly over the past few weeks. Normally I don't need to bid as work flows in. This isn't happening. Also, bids are not producing results and the amount of work available seems less. Featuring my profile and offers (which normally works well) is bringing zero results or a spate of fake jobs or people ASKING ME for work!! I am naturally concerned.
Is anyone else finding this? Is it due to school holidays or a sign of the times?
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Agree Jane I am similar to you and don't need to bid but my work is slower and I am still improving my ranking month on month. The problem is a lack of support on the site and too many fake and low-skilled workers PPH has allowed to join. It has totally dumb-down the marketplace and they seem to not want to prevent fraud, plagiarism or spam. I get the people asking me for work, I have reported them and nothing was ever done. Likewise, they seem to want to charge UK prices when the cost of living in other areas of the world is significantly cheaper and it distorts the marketplace.
For me, I would rather pay a higher commission for a better site as at the moment it is useless, they really need to get established freelancers involved with the running of the site and prevent any new foreign sellers without established profiles on other freelancer sites. As a UK business, they should promote UK freelancers
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I think it's a combination of things. Yes, this site has definitely seen a clear fall in standards - a lack of decent jobs to apply for and an increase in fake and fraudulent new members. BUT my work outside of this site has also slowed down. That tells me it's across the board, the economy is just staggering along.
@Jane - I write, copy edit, proofread and transcribe. Artificial intelligence has played a part in decreasing my workload. Three of my financial clients now use Otter instead of manual transcription for webinars, etc. It's not as accurate but they don't mind as they're only using the content for their own purposes.
It's all a bit worrying, but hopefully things will trickle through in due course. That said, PPH should be hiring freelancers from their own site to promote UK services.
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Yeah things have really slowed to a crawl for me here. I have literally only made £50 in 2023 (or should I say £38 after fees), and had to wait for a month for that to even hit my bank account thanks to PPH needing to do all of their top level security checks. Also, it's not like I was lighting the world on fire before then.
All my new/random freelance gigs are now through Upwork. There is a lot of sh*t to wade through there, but at least there are so many jobs posted that you can find *something*. I just wish I hadn't deleted my account there many many years ago when it got transferred from Elance back in the day. It's been tricky to build up momentum and reviews there but it has more chance of paying off that focusing on PPH.
The fact that my CERT score still hovers around the 5 & Top border makes me this the whole platform is dying and it's not just us...
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Strangely, I've seen the opposite in the last 2 or 3 weeks and I've done more PPH work this month than at any time in the last 4 years, in a similar period. The difference now is that most of my jobs come from direct enquiries when I used to only get them from bidding on projects. There are very few projects posted that are of interest to me. Buyers I speak to are put off by the spam that they get as soon as they post a project, from low quality freelancers who haven't read the project description.
There is a difference in the ranking system because I now spend a lot of time on the monthly leaderboard. In the past I would only get there if a big invoice was paid right at the start of the month. Now I can stay on that leaderboard with far lower earnings, which suggests that some of the people at the top end are earning a lot less. Maybe I have gone up a few places in my own field and that is leading to more direct enquiries.
The recent run on work has reminded me just how much we pay in commission. I remember when it was 15% for the first part of the month (was that £350?) and then the rate dropped to something like 3.5% for the rest of the month. Now it is 20% on almost everything, because very few clients spend more than £250 with me.
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