30 million people. That’s around 5 million more people than the entire population of Australia. It’s nearly half the population of the U.K., and nearly 10 percent of the United States. And now it’s the number of people in the global Freelancer.com community.
That’s right, Freelancer.com has officially hit 30 million registered users worldwide. If Freelancer.com were a country, it would be substantially larger than Portugal, Sweden and Denmark combined.
While this is a landmark milestone for Freelancer.com, it’s also a major milestone for each and every person who makes up the Freelancer.com global community, with 30 million different stories to tell and millions of successes to celebrate. Here’s to you.
The businesses, entrepreneurs and individuals in the Freelancer.com community are the beating heart of what we do, and always have been. I started Freelancer.com after finding out firsthand just how powerful an online pool of skilled professionals can be.
I needed to get some data entry done. I looked around for someone to do the work, but nobody was interested. After a quick online search, I stumbled across an online marketplace called GetAFreelancer, which I used to post a job and find a freelancer to do the work. It was done in just a few days.
I immediately saw the potential in this approach, and started building an eBay for jobs and services. That was nearly a decade ago. Now, we’re working to empower entrepreneurs globally through what has become the world’s largest marketplace for freelancing and crowdsourcing.
To date, nearly 15 million jobs have been posted on Freelancer.com in more than 1,000 different areas of work. None of this could have happened without the talented and innovative individuals who make up the Freelancer.com community.
We’ve come a long way together. But we still have a long way to go. Ultimately, we want to change a billion lives on this planet by giving people opportunity and income through a job.
When I see some of the messages from Freelancer.com users — about how lives have been changed thanks to the marketplace, or how budding entrepreneurs have been able to create a new business from scratch — it not only validates what we’re doing to improve the lives of millions of people around the world, it also validates the talented individuals that make up the Freelancer.com community.
As part of our 30 million user milestone celebrations, we’re offering a share in US$5,000 worth of prizes for the best projects in the categories of architecture, branding, 3D and digital, along with the chance to uncover and tell the story of talented individuals who will have the opportunity to become the ‘new face of Freelancer’.
With this competition, we want to recognise the value and the power that the Freelancer.com community delivers, and we want to reward the incredible work that is accomplished via the Freelancer.com marketplace every single day.
