More than 100,000 people have been laid off in the technology industry alone this year, and — either by circumstance or choice — at least some of them are not heading back into exclusively full-time work. LinkedIn launched a freelancer marketplace in 2021 to capture some of that activity. Now, at a time when other freelancer marketplaces are struggling, the Microsoft-owned company is giving its first major update on how that’s been going.
Some 10 million people have created pages on its Services Marketplace to date, it says, up 48% in the last year. Service requests — not actual commercial engagements (that’s not a number it is sharing) — are on the rise, too, averaging eight per minute and up 65% overall year-over-year.
To put those numbers into some context, LinkedIn currently has just over 1 billion registered users, meaning that the freelancer marketplace has snagged the interest of just 1% of its user base. And the level of interest on the buyer side is not so clear: Not only is LinkedIn not sharing how many services are being sold, but it’s not providing any details on how much sellers are charging or any other trends.
It’s tricky to compare how LinkedIn is doing compared to its competitors. Two large, publicly traded peers, Fiverr and Upwork, do not officially disclose how many sellers they have on their platforms, focusing instead on buyer numbers, which are respectively around 4 million and 868,000. (Estimates for freelancers on these platforms vary widely from hundreds of thousands to millions.)
LinkedIn’s premise for its services marketplace initially was to build a new business and service for its users by tapping into the new world of work that was emerging in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It was following a rising tide that was lifting other boats. Share prices of Fiverr and Upwork were surging as a new class of knowledge workers were opting to work more flexibly. Those platforms were seeing a lot of interest from buyers, too: Businesses were also leaning into “on-demand” models to fill their needs.
Fast forward to 2024, however, and freelancer marketplaces are recalibrating their business models after seeing declines in demand, increasing their “take rates” to keep revenues up as more people opt for steady employment or simply have moved away from these platforms — a trend that might well change, too, if more AI services take hold in the coming years.
LinkedIn’s 10 million figure, however, and the fact that it’s making the news public, is notable. It shows that the company still sees an opportunity to lean into freelancing, despite the modest gains that it’s made so far.
Although the company has plans to eventually look at ways of building in more formal pricing, right now it’s using the freelancer platform to build engagement and to help drive premium subscriptions.
People who pay for the Premium Business tier can boost exposure for their freelancer profile (known as a Service Page on LinkedIn). LinkedIn tells me that premium subscriptions are up 51% this fiscal year, working out to $1.7 billion in revenue. This remains a small part of the bigger picture for the company, however, which made over $16 billion in the last fiscal year.