Outsourcing company freelancer.com regularly releases the fifty fastest moving job descriptions requested by their customers.
This year’s list shows how the online industry is changing – content creation, social media and SEO job requests are all down substantially as users and gatekeepers like Google adapt to the information flood we all have to deal with.
Keeping in mind the market that Freelancer.com caters to small businesses and many of the jobs posted are for fairly small – some would say laughingly tiny and insulting – amounts, it’s probably safe to say we’re looking at the low value end of the market.
Article writing (down 15%), proofreading (5%), blogging (13%) and submission (4%) jobs are probably the cheap and nasty “Demand Media” style of low quality content designed for SEO purposes.
SEO itself is in trouble with jobs in that sector down 7% indicating Google’s Panda and Penguin search engine changes have achieved their objectives of improving search results and knocking out those gaming the system with low quality content.
A similar thing has happened with social media. Facebook is too hard for many businesses and they’re not seeing a return on their substantial time investment.
“Companies in industries from consumer electronics to financial services tell us they’re no longer sure Facebook is the best place to dedicate their social marketing budget—a shocking fact given the site’s dominance among users,” Freelancer quotes Nate Elliott, an analyst at market research firm Forrester.
A bright part in Freelancer’s list is the rise is in open standards as HTML5 starts moving up the list with 20% growth.
“The Internet is becoming more interactive, and the technologies that are winning and will continue to win are open standards like HTML5 and jQuery- to the detriment of the incumbents proprietary technology providers like Adobe and Microsoft,” says Freelancer’s CEO Matt Barrie.
Open standards aren’t winning everywhere though as Apple’s iOS is clearly winning the developer war as iPhone grows by 30% and iPad by 26% compared to Android’s 20%.
Freelancer’s list is an interesting snapshot at where industry demand is right now, what’s we’re starting to see are some of the transition effects working their way through the system. The rise and fall of the social media and SEO specialists being one of those.
The full Freelancer list is below;
