Thursday, April 25, 2013

Fiverr does not pay off


Fiverr.com is a website were sellers offer their services for only $5. It can be anything for something complete silly or cute to marketing and business related micro jobs.

I joined the site almost a year ago to see if I could make a few bucks, being unemployed and all. I thought if I just posted a few jobs that looked fun or useful, I could actually make some decent money. The first week I got about 20 jobs from the same customer to draw cute animated monsters for an Ipod app. I learned that you don't get a full 5$, you get $3.92. Fiverr deducts some fees.


So I thought, okay, I just need a lot more customers to make a decent profit. And to get more customers, I would offer to do a 30 second animation for "5$". Big mistake. You see, there are some people that are so despite for money that they are willing to do anything for a measly few cents. That causes the value to go down in certain categorizes. And some people would love to take advantage of that.

My email suddenly became overwhelmed with people asking me to do all sorts of animations. Most of the people asked for very complected animation and longer then 30 seconds. People just don't understand how time consuming animation is. Even stick figure animations would take a while. In the end, I just deleted that job posting and abandoned Fiverr. My lesson was to value my time and worth. If it takes days to make $3.92 or even a few hours, then I might as well be working at a sweat shop. Not to mention I can get payed more doing less effort on MTurk or other survey sites. Especially because it may take days or even weeks for you to get a customer on Fiverr.

I see people with real talent on Fiverr who post micro jobs that are worth hundreds of dollars. But Fiverr feels no shame in making money of chumps I suppose. If you just want to do a few things on this website because it sounds really fun then go for it. But I would avoid this website if you're really good at what you do.