employment | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Airtasker and the future of work

Micro task service Airtasker looks to reinvent employment in a partnership with the CareerOne job site.

Tim Fung, the co-founder of Airtasker, has been previously been interviewed on this blog about micro tasking service’s mission to change the workplace.

With the news that that Airtasker had gone into a partnership with employment site CareerOne it seemed Tim might be a good guest to kick off the first video for the Decoding the New Economy YouTube channel.

During the interview Tim describes the motivations behind starting Airtasker, how he sees the relationship with CareerOne evolving and the benefits of operating out of a co-working space.

The Tank Stream Labs working space is an interesting setup – based at the bottom of Pitt Street in the heart of Sydney’s financial centre, it’s not in the more edgy areas on the city fringes where the rest of the town’s workspace are located.

Being away from the hipsters and grunge doesn’t seem to have hurt Tank Stream Labs as the space has now expanded to a second floor of the ten storey office block. The roll call of tenants is quite impressive too.

For Tim being in the workspace has been a great benefit for Airtasker.

There’s always the thing about sharing knowledge and more obviously there’s a lot of great contacts that everyone shares.

Airtasker’s relationship with employment site CareerOne is an interesting development that sees the joint venture between News Limited and Monster move into the crowdsourcing field. It also gives job hunters an opportunity to find short term work while looking for a more permanent role.

People are looking for more hours of work but equally businesses were coming to CareerOne and saying ‘hey, all you do is full time work’ and that’s only one piece of the employment puzzle.’

For CareerOne it really allows them to build up the full spectrum – all the way from tasks to part time to full time and be a one stop shop for employment.

How that works for CareerOne remains to be seen, but for Airtasker and Tim it validates their business model along with exposing their service to a wider audience.

With the workforce evolving and the trend to informal, casualised employment; services like Airtasker and the US Task Rabbit will take a more prominent role in workers’ careers. While it’s debatable on how desirable or stable such employment is, it’s the reality of a process that started in the 1970s.

Tim takes a more sanguine view of the challenges facing workers in an informal employment market.

What I’m sharing on Airtasker is my free time. Currently we have this pool of literally tens of thousands of hours of people sitting around saying ‘I’d love to have a job’ and that’s an underutilised resource.

Airtasker in many ways is one of the new breed of middlemen creating markets where one didn’t exist before. The service is an example of how new ways to communicate create opportunities to connect buyers and sellers.

Services like Airtasker are part of the future that’s very different to the world we or our parents grew up. It’s going to be interesting to see how society and governments evolve around the realities of today’s workplace.

Expat workers and their fragile, guilded cage

The guilded cage for expats is a nice comfortable place to, but it can be a lot more fragile than many think.

I was sitting on the back of a motorbike grimly clutching a briefcase full of 100 baht bills when the realities of working in Thailand really dawned on me.

One of the downsides of being the contracts administrator in an Engineering company is that one gets stuck with the jobs that doesn’t fit anybody’s official duties.

This time it was going to rescue Ken – not his real name – a Kiwi Project Manager who instead of enjoying Friday afternoon in a Soi Cowboy beer bar was under siege in his site hut in suburban Bangkok.

Because of a glitch in the insanely bureaucratic payroll system our Singaporean employers used, Ken’s labourers hadn’t been paid and now they were threatening to burn down the site hut with Ken and his office staff in it.

So the story of Chip Starnes, the US businessman freed yesterday after being held hostage by former employees in his Beijing office for six days, is very familiar. It’s a story that expat workers should understand about their status and position when they take an overseas assignment.

While Chip seems to have come out of the ordeal unscathed apart from being in need of a good night’s sleep and a shower, it could have been much worse; shortly after I left Thailand an Australian accountant was gunned down over a business dispute involving a sugar mill outside Bangkok.

In Dubai, two Australian property developers find themselves mired in a legal dispute that could see them facing a decade in gaol.

The risks involved in being an expat worker are easily to overlook, particularly in places like Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore where the life is good for western expatriate workers – the reality for Filipino maids or Pakistani labourers is another matter of course.

When things go wrong though, they go wrong badly and the reality of life in a foreign country can be a rude shock for expats who thought they were living a privileged existence.

The guilded cage for expats is a nice, comfortable place to live in but it is a lot more fragile than many think.

For Ken, he escaped being burned out of his site hut by an angry mob as we arrived before the torches were lit. Some frantic dishing out of notes to the crowd – I’m still sure many of those we gave money to didn’t actually work for us – defused the situation.

Ken still got his Friday night beers at Soi Cowboy and took the whole saga as being part of a day’s work in Thailand, but then Ken was an old Asia construction hand who had no illusions of what could befall an innocent expat. Others might not have been so relaxed.

Dubai image from SG777 through SXC.HU

Fire and be dammed, the poor management at tech companies

Quick firing firing of employees who make mistakes shows a weakness in the management of many tech companies.

Microsoft manager Adam Orth has joined the ranks of those fired after some poorly thought out comments found their way onto the Reddit discussion boards. The firing of Orth illustrates a weakness in the management of tech firms.

Orth’s firing follows the “forked dongle” affair where two developers lost their jobs over sexist comments at an industry conference.

What’s notable in all these firings is how Playhaven, SendGrid and Microsoft’s management all summarily fired their employees for what at worse could be described as a ‘lapse of judgement’.

One of the conceits of modern management is that risk can be eliminated, the mark of a poor manager is to act quickly to get rid of anything that could potentially be a risk.

These tech companies are good illustrations of this – neither Adam Orth, Adria Richards or the Playhaven developer deserved to lose their jobs over this, all it required was an apology and commitment to be more careful about what they post on the public internet in future.

All of us, including the sensitive and incompetent firing managers, have something on the internet that could embarrass us or our employers. In an era where people are quick to take offense, it’s easy for something taken out of context to spin out of control.

That’s a risk beyond the control of middle managers at software companies.

Hiding from risks or attempting to purge them is not the way to run an organisation. Strong, good managers can do better than that.

Management manual image by Ulrik through SXC.hu

Employment’s changing face

Is it management’s and white collar workers’ turn to deal with the change of contracting and business process outsourcing?

Last Thursday recruitment company Talent2 launched its 2013 Market Pulse Survey looking at the employment trends across the Asia Pacific.

According to the survey, things are looking good with 61% of businesses across the Asia Pacific forecasting growth and 45% expecting to hire more staff.

However there’s an interesting underlying theme to the good news, employment is changing in large organisations.

One of the give-aways is the fact that while nearly two-thirds of businesses expect to grow in 2013, less than half intend to increase staff. Businesses are doing more with less.

Part of this is because of increased automation. Despite the headlines, productivity is increasing in workplaces – particularly offices – as technology automates many business functions in fields like logistics and workforce management.

Another aspect driving the lack of employment is outsourcing, Talent2 say the proportion of Australians working as full time employees dipped below 75% in 2012 with a four percentage point drop over the year.

With more businesses contracting work out, one could expect the number of sole proprietors to be increasing. However this seems not to be the case.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the number of sole traders is barely moving – between 2006 and 2011 the number of “non-employing Australian businesses” only increased 5% while the population grew over 8%.

This implies the proportion of contractors in the workforce is actually shrinking.

Much of this is probably due to the work going offshore, particularly to Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) in countries like the Philippines, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.

Saturday’s Australian Financial Review looked at what the BPOs are doing in the Philippines and they aren’t carrying out the call centre and basic clerical work that’s made up most of the outsourcing over the last twenty years. Now it’s management roles that are going offshore.

The bigger issue confronting Australians, however, is not call centre workers being relocated to the Philippines. It’s low- to mid-level professional jobs, being moved out of companies, accounting firms and law offices.

Legal outsourcing has been growing for a decade as large law firms have moved many of their para-legal and routine tasks offshore to countries where legal graduates are plentiful but work at lower rates than their western colleagues.

An interesting aspect in legal offshoring is that much of the work that was done by young lawyers has now gone to overseas contractors, which probably means there’s going to be a shortage of experienced legal practioners in the medium term. This is going to have profound consequences for law firms and their partners.

It’s also going to mean law and associated degrees are going to be less popular with school leavers as career prospects dwindle.

The biggest impact though is for managers – we’ve grown used to the assumption that management jobs stay at head office while the lower level jobs go to the lowest cost provider.

Now is those lowest cost providers are offering good quality management staff along with support desk and call centre staff.

During the restructurings of the 1980s and 90s, it was blue collar workers who were the most affected by change. Now it’s the turn of the office workers and managers.

It will be interesting to see how many of the people who thought they were secure in their roles deal with the uncertainty they now have. For some it’s going to be a tough decade.

Why you won’t retire

Can we afford to retire at 65 when life expectancy is over 80 and could be 150 in a generation?

Outliving Our Super is the headline of an Australian Financial Review story on the problems of an aging population.

Jacqui Hayes cites a billboard in San Francisco declaring that life expectancy will soon be 150 and we have to plan for longer retirements.

The flaw in this discussion is the idea of retiring in our 60s. When the age pension was introduced in 1910, a new-born boy could expect to live 55 years and a girl, 59 years. The odds were against the average person every receiving the pension which was an effective, if ruthless, way of ensuring the solvency of social security programs.

A hundred years later, a new born can expect to live well into their eighties. Meaning the average person will spend two decades in retirement.

Making matters worse is the nature of that Millennial’s work pattern – when great, great grandpa entered the workforce in the 1920s, he was almost certainly in his early teens and worked a solid fifty years paying his taxes before prospect of retirement arrived.

Today, that child won’t enter the workforce until at least their late teens and more likely until their early twenties. A modern child is also going to have a much more fragmented work career and will likely have periods of unemployment or low earnings as a casual or contract worker.

For today’s child to retire at 65 it would mean he or she will have had to saved enough over a forty year working life to sustain them for fifteen years of retirement, those numbers are tough and to achieve it most won’t be living the millionaire lifestyle during their golden years.

With a life expectancy of 150, the early twentieth century model of retiring at 60 or 65 means today’s child would spend less than 30% of their lives in the workforce. Put simply, the numbers don’t add up.

The reality is most of us won’t be retiring at 65, the baby boomers reaching retirement age now are learning this and it’s a lesson that’s going to get harder for the Gen X’s and Y’s following them.

As a society, or an electorate, we can pretend there’s no problem and policy makers and politicians will pander to our refusal to face the truth by keeping structures that reflect early Twentieth Century aspirations rather than Twenty-First Century realities.

We have to face the reality that the retiring at 65 is unaffordable dream for most of us. Once we accept this, we can get on with building longer lasting careers.

Picture of pensioners courtesy of andreyutzu on SXC.HU

Australia and the Dutch Disease

Australia’s greatest management challenge is dealing with the country’s dose of the Dutch Disease

This week sees the launch of the annual G’Day USA festival where Australian exporters and various celebrities extol the virues of the country across the United States.

One of Australia’s success stories of the last decade has been Yellowtail Wines which carved a niche for Australian wines in the US in the same way Jacob’s Creek did a decade earlier in the UK.

Today the Australian Financial Review reports that Cassella Wines, the maker of Yellowtail, is in breach of its banking covenants due to the high Australian dollar.

Cassella Wines is another victim of Australia’s Dutch Disease infection.

Dutch Disease owes its name to the Netherlands’ gas boom of the 1960s. By the early 1970s the strong Guilder damaged the rest of the Dutch economy which didn’t profit from extracting natural gas.

Having sleepwalked into the Dutch Disease, it’s fascinating how Australia’s electorate, policy makers and business leaders are in denial about the effects as successful exporters like Cassella Wines struggle with a high dollar and accelerating costs.

When commodity prices and the dollar turn, and they always do, its going to be tough for the economy to adapt as much of the industry capacity that was competitive at lower rates won’t be available to take advantage of the lower costs and to pick up the slack from a declining mining sector.

For Australian businesses, the onus is on managers and proprietors to protect their organisations from the short term effects of a high currency and the medium term effect of a falling dollar pushing up the input prices of imports.

In other words, getting costs down without becoming too reliant on offshored labour or suppliers. The companies that manage this are going to be very strong after the initial adjustment, but it’s a tough management task.

While that task can, and will be, done by smart and hardworking leaders no-one should expect any recognition of the scale of this task from governments, media or business organisations who seem to be in denial of reality.

The Dutch and Australian flags image is courtesy of Emilev through SXC

Digital hunter gathering

Digital hunter gatherers are another mis-reading of history and the economy. We should be careful about these labels.

It has come to this – we’ve had the digital natives, the digital immigrants and now we have the digital hunter-gatherers.

This is the logical end of the ‘sharing economy’ philosophy which sees retweets, mentions and Facebook likes a hard asset.

Unfortunately having 100,000 Facebook friends giving the thumbs up to your latest retweet of an article of dubious value doesn’t translate into income – most of the digital curators find themselves living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Life as a hunter gatherer is not pretty or easy – it’s short and brutal. The only certainty as a hunter gatherer is if you don’t find something to eat today, you will starve tomorrow.

In some ways, it’s fair to say the modern social media expert is not dissimilar to the prehistoric hunter gatherers in that their days are numbered and starvation is a near certainty.

One conceit of modern times is that life was so much better in the pre-industrial era; that before the industrial revolution people worked less and primitive man lived a noble life unshackled by possessions.

That’s all nonsense. Mankind shifted to an agricultural and then an industrial society because life is a lot better than fighting sabre toothed tigers for buffalo or trying to live on berries.

Myths like this are part of masking the steady decline in middle and working class incomes. George Freedman, the CEO of the Stratfor security consultancy, discussed this in his blog post The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power.

The rise of the precariat, workers employed on a casual or project based basis, is part of that erosion of incomes. As Freedman says, the “the decline of traditional corporations and the creation of corporate agility that places individual workers at a massive disadvantage”.

In this respect, today’s digital hunter gatherers are more like the day labourers of a hundred years ago where workers, like my great-grandfathers, would wait at the gates of the factories or docks hoping to be picked for the day’s work.

One of the truths of today’s workforce is that it’s a harder place than a generation ago and the expectation of naturally rising incomes is gone for the bulk of the population.

This means we have to re-imagine our own roles in a changed economy. The assumptions of the post-war economy which have sustained us for over fifty years no longer hold.

Hunter gathering hopefully won’t be option which we end up with.

Reproductions at the Museo del Mamut, Barcelona 2011 from quinet on Flickr

Pulling up the drawbridge

Is the unpaid content model of unpaid journalism not only unsustainable, but hypocritical?

“Online bloggers and tweters are not subject to the financial incentives which affect the print media.”

While there’s much to disagree with in Lord Justice Leveson’s Australian speeches last week, particularly the bizarre suggestion that bloggers and social media are driving the decline in journalistic standards, he is correct about the economics of online publishing. It’s tough to make a buck on the web.

It’s so tough, many of the new media startups are founded on not paying for the articles they publish. This model has become so entrenched, that some venture capital investors will only invest in media start ups if they don’t have any reporters or editors.

Pure platforms

New media startup Buzzfeed‘s founder, Jonah Peretti, mentioned Silicon Valley’s reluctant to pay writers in a staff email republished by Chris Dixon;

Tech investors prefer pure platform companies because you can just focus on the tech, have the users produce the content for free, and scale the business globally without having to hire many people.

This antithesis to paying creatives and content creators is one of the notable aspects of the current Silicon Valley model, who needs editors and writers when a billion people will post to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram?

Arianna Huffington has been the most successful with this model in the media industry, parlaying a largely unpaid for content business into a fat pay-off. Chris Anderson described this model best in a description of his website Geek Dad’s economics.

Reading the comments

For readers, much of the value in sites like the Huffington Post and Geek Dad lie in the comments stream where readers give their views and experiences and build the communities so many investors and advertisers are looking for.

This is a point made by Rachel Hills when commenting about Australian website Mamamia’s payment policies;

When I visit Mamamia. I don’t go to Mamamia for the articles, which usually don’t tell me anything I haven’t already read somewhere else. I go for the comments.

Rachel concludes with the thought that Mia Freedman’s Mamamia is providing a platform for discussion. This is true, but that’s no different from newspapers, the six o’clock news, current affairs shows or even the weekend’s football match.

Those football players, newsreaders and journalists are all paid for their work, just like Chris Anderson and Mia Freedman were as magazine editors.

The hypocrisy of unpaid content

Which leads us to the core hypocrisy of the unpaid content model; its promoters – people like Mia Freedman, Chris Anderson and Arianna Huffington – have all been well paid in their careers yet now choose to deny the next generation of writers and journalist an income.

A business adviser once remarked to me that the management of a corporation that were locking in their entitlements while cutting middle management were “pulling up the drawbridge”, that line seems apt as older, affluent journalists demand younger ones work as unpaid contributors or interns.

The bleat from online publishers is “we can’t afford to pay contributors”, in most other industries being able to pay your workers is a measure of whether your business is solvent. That many new media outlets can’t may mean that the entire industry is insolvent.

Writers get exposure

Were the local cafe to say it couldn’t afford to pay its waitstaff, but it was giving them valuable work experience they’d be rightly scorned for exploiting workers. There’s little difference with online publishers.

It may well be because there is no shortage of manipulative, attention grabbing garbage designed to provoke reactions and increase pageviews, which is the flaw in the “writers get exposure” excuse used by many of these sites.

As middlemen, publishers have to add value in order to have a role, ‘offering exposure’ to unpaid writers isn’t a reason in itself. This is an industry with shaky foundations and it’s not surprising founders are desperately trying to find greater fools to fund their exits.

Image of Michael Arrington from Kevin Krejci on Flickr.

Newly normal in the English Midlands

The new normal will be different to the old normal – is the English Midlands a vision of the future?

On their metal, a story from BBC Radio’s In Business program looked at how the English Midlands is dealing with the toughest economic conditions the beleaguered region has suffered for decades.

Once the centre of the industrial revolution, The Midlands have had a tough time of the last fifty years as the region caught the brunt of Britain’s de-industrialisation and the loss of thousands of engineering jobs.

Today, the surviving engineering companies are struggling to find new markets as orders from Europe dry up and many Midlands workers find they are confronting the ‘New Normal’.

The ‘New Normal’ for British industry is described by Mark Smith, Regional Chairman, Price Waterhouse Coopers Birmingham who points out that UK industries have to sell to the fast growing economies.

Interestingly this is similar, but very different in practice, to the Australian belief – where the Asian Century report sees Australia continuing being a price-taking quarry for Asia rather than selling much of real value – the Brits see some virtue in adding value to what they sell to Asia’s growing economies.

The British experience though shows the realities of the ‘New Normal’ for Western economies – the cafe owner featured in story now offers no dish over £3 and the idea of overpriced five quid tapas are long gone. The customers can’t afford it.

Part of this is because of the casualisation of the workforce as people find salaried jobs are no longer available and become freelancers or self-employed. One could argue this is the prime reason why unemployment hasn’t soared in the UK and US since the global financial crisis.

That ‘new normal’ features the precariat – the modern army of informal white and blue collar workers who have more in common with their grandparents who worked for day wages at the docks and factories in the 1930s than their parents who had safe, stable jobs through the 1950s and 60s.

For the precariat, the idea of sick leave, paid holidays or a stable career started to vanish after the 1970s oil shock and accelerated in the 1990s. The new normal is the old normal for them, there just happens to be more of them after the 2008 crash.

With a workforce increasingly working for casual wages without security of income, the 1980s consumerist business model built around ever increasing consumption starts to look damaged.

The same too applies to the banking industry which grew fat on providing the credit that unpinned the late 20th Century consumer binge.

When the 2008 financial crisis signalled the end of the 20th Century credit binge, the banks were caught out. Which is why governments had to step in to help the financial system rebuild its reserves.

The effects of that reserve building also affected businesses as bank credit dried up. Early in the BBC program Stuart Fell, the Chairman of Birmingham’s Metal Assemblies Ltd described how his bank decided to cut his line of credit from £800,000 to £300,000 which forced the management to find half a million pounds in a hurry.

That experience has been repeated across the world as banks have used their government support and easy money policies to recapitalise their damaged accounts rather than lend money to entrepreneurial customers to build businesses.

Businesses are now looking at other sources to find capital from organisations like the Black Country Reinvestment Society which is profiled in the story that raises money from local investors to provide small businesses with working capital.

Communities helping themselves and each other is the real ‘New Normal’ – waiting for the banks to lend money or hoping that surplus obsessed governments will save businesses or provide adequate safety will only end in disappointment as the real austerity of our era starts to be felt.

The New Normal is declining income for most people in the Western world and we need to think of how we can help our neighbours as most of us can be sure we’re going to need their help.

Just as the English Midlands lead the world into the industrial revolution, it may be that the region is giving us a view of what much of the Western world will be like for the next fifty years.

Are you a worthy customer?

Some businesses aren’t worth worrying about as customers.

“Those companies are not going to be winners in the long term. We’re very happy to work with the fastest growing companies in the world; the companies who understand that people are core to who they are,” says Daniel Debow, Vice President of Salesforce’s Work.com at the recent Dreamforce conference.

Debow was talking about companies that aren’t interested in social software, or those who don’t have the infrastructure or management culture to implement changes which reflect the modern workplace.

When writing about social and cloud services one thing that jumps out is just how unprepared many businesses, big and small, are for changes that are happening in both the workplace and the market.

The story of Work.com reflects those changes – the idea behind Rypple and Work.com, which was born out of Salesforce’s 2011 acquisiton of Rypple, is that workplaces are inherently social.

“We spend as much more time with the people we work than with our families. It matters to us what our workmates think” says Daniel so Work.com gathers the social intelligence within the business to give people real time feedback on their performance.

The Rypple idea lies in the inadequacy of existing HR software and management practices. Daniel says, “today this model we have it’s totally not reflective of the reality of how people work; people are more connected, they’re collaborative, more realtime.”

This collaborative and realtime way of doing business challenges the structures in many businesses and the methods of a lot of managers. Many are ill-equipped to deal with a more open and transparent way of managing their teams.

In fact, software like work.com and its competitor Workday make some of those older style managers redundant, particularly those whose roles involve little more than box ticking and following the strictures of the company’s procedure manual as this can be done better by a computer program.

The problem for many organisations, both private and public, is they have become more focused on cossetting and protecting the box ticking bureaucrats of middle and upper management rather than delivering service to their customers and supporting their staff responsible for keeping clients happy.

Something that jumps out when you talk to entrepreneurs like Daniel Debow and others building new social and cloud companies is their lack of interest in selling to those organisations, their view is the old school companies are dinosaurs on the path to extinction.

Dinosaurs though lasted a lot longer than we often think and the same is true of the current generation of zombie companies being kept alive by government or investors too scared to book the losses which the failure of these enterprises would entail.

While those dinosaurs are going to be a drag on our economies for the next decade or two, the real opportunities – and rewarding work – is with those businesses who want to change and aren’t run for the administrative convenience of their managers.

The question for many business owners and managers is whether companies like Rypple or Workday could be bothered selling to you. If you’re not, it’s time to consider your exit strategy – or lobby your local politician for some subsidies.

Paul travelled to Dreamforce courtesy of Salesforce.com

Outsourcing’s changing face

Freelancer’s 50 fastest movers job list shows some interesting trends

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;

Creative Quandaries

How artists, musicians and writers are struggling with the economics of the online economy

In February, musician, coder and uber-geek David Lowery gave a talk to the SF Music Tech Summit on the difficulties musicians have making money in the online economy.

Meet the Old Boss, Worse Than The Last Boss is an excellent dissection of the economics of the music industry as it currently stands – and it doesn’t look good for artists.

David shows how the old distribution model was more rewarding for artists than today’s digital model, the old fashioned record store has largely gone out of business and has been replaced with the iTunes where Apple receive half the income of the local shop but assumes no risk, few costs and a far greater profit margin.

Similarly, the record labels’ costs and risks haven’t substantially changed but their income has plummeted.

We’ve seen the controllers of the music distribution business replaced with a far smaller, and more profitable, group of digital gatekeepers.

A great line in David’s presentation is just how much money technology company executives are making compared to their record industry counterparts of the 1980s, without taking on the responsibilities for keeping the creative supply pipeline flowing.

Record labels value content and content creators. Sure they kept a lot of money for their executives (although even mid 90?s music executive pay is dwarfed by tech executive pay.) But record labels unlike tech companies, know they built their businesses on those who create content. Therefore when they were flush with cash they set out to buy the services of as many artists as they could. This had the effect of sharing the wealth with musicians. It may have been uneven it may have been wasteful, it may have not touched every artists and the labels may have pocketed most of the revenue but at least they felt they needed to give something back to the content creators. They knew artists created something of value.

The key words in the above passage are “content creators” as the struggles of the music industry are similar to those of writers, photographers and anybody creating original works that can be digitized.

Probably one of the most interesting aspects of this are that many of the digerati David criticises for their utopian views on technology are themselves marginalised, and often impoverished, by the same economics.

David links to a number of Huffington Post articles examples, yet it’s Adrianna Huffington and her contemporaries like Chris Anderson who are aggregating paid writers work and turning most of us into digital sharecroppers.

It’s the Lords of the Digital Manor who are making a return while the bulk of content creators struggles.

Those digirati, like myself, are making just as poor a living from their work as David’s friends in the music industry.

What’s clear is we have to find the methods of distributing music and other valuable creative works that benefit the artist or writer, the old models of the publishing, broadcasting and music industries did this – not always fairly, but at least creators were rewarded.

Right now we’re in a world where information is free and a small group of gatekeepers are controlling what revenues are available.

It’s unlikely that situation is sustainable and over time we’ll see new models develop to displace the current gatekeepers who may be part of the transition effect to a changed economy.

The person who figures out the successful model will be the 21st Century’s Randolph Hearst – hopefully they’ll spread the wealth around a bit more than the current gatekeepers.