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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Fiverr is effectively a spam factory. I would be curious to see the breakdown of its most popular offerings. How many of them are legitimately creative tasks, and how many are "I will post your link to fifty web 2.0 sites?" More importantly, how much revenue can Fiverr attribute to these "gigs" that are borderline legal? Their F-1 filing does not mention it as a risk factor. [0]

This website has its roots in the gray-hat side of the SEO and affiliate marketing industries. It's shocking to see it valued at $700M. Surely we are in a bubble?

[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1762301/000104746919...

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I spent $500 usd on Fiverr in the last month getting design done, getting studio musicians and rappers recording parts for music. Previously had full animated videos made there. It's pretty great.

How do you ensure quality? I usually find 4-5 people for the same tasks and 1 or 2 are in the end to my expectations.

Aren't the prices usually low enough that you can have the work done multiple times and choose the best one?

Yep, it's pretty much the way you do discovery of quality work in this sort of market.

I've commissioned vector artwork from 3-4 people and just picked the best one, and then kept working with that person going forward.

That's my approach. Want a logo for a project? Get it done by five different people instead of having one person do a few iterations. Over time of course you find people you'll go back to for specific types of work.

That's usually how it normally works with creative agencies in the industry. You brief them and they come up with a creative work, but there's always several rounds of back-and-forth to get refine it to the point you want it at.

Do you pay all the prices, then I don't know that it would be cheap. Do you not pay the ones you don't choose, then I'm not sure it's ethical.

At some point, I needed a logo for my hobby website. Nothing fancy, just better than what I could cook up with my non-existent creative skills.

I asked 5 different people on Fiver to create one for $5 each and chose the best one.

This is obviously an example on the low end, but you could expand this to the $500 dollar range per designer for a full website template and still end up with a decent looking thing for $2500.

I do but having to weed out the obvious template modifiers first is very annoying. In particular for design tasks (logos, infographics, etc) you have to look through at least 20 profiles before getting an idea on who is having original ideas and who is just modifying the same 50 templates over and over again.

I review their portfolio and create a sample task to see how communication goes along and then if I am satisfied I place real order. It is not expensive so I can try few people before commiting to some more work. I find this website extremely helpful. I also like that this website enables artists from impoverished countries make living.

Out of interest years ago, I spend $20 on a few different gigs that offered link building, the results were actually amazing. (Not in a good way)

They usually offer to post links for a couple of days, and sure enough, right on the dot, you can see traffic flowing in, once the period is over, it suddenly stops. Of course all traffic came from AWS or Google Cloud. I confronted one of the guys with the data I saw, he then decided to just keep one of his virtual machines up, and drive fake traffic to my site for months.

I did have some good results with some tedious data scraping tasks. But you have to explicitly tell them what you want, and in what format.

What is link building supposed to be?

It's mostly to give your domain more authority (thus making it rank higher) by putting your link on various other sites. Of course in reality, you want your link to be on other sites with relevant content.

I get spam emails all the time with links to shady fiverr gigs. Usually goes something like:

Hi, I wanted to let you know that your site has a lot of porn and gambling spam. Please get in touch to me to have removed. If you dont contact, there will be more porn spam and your site will be dead. So no waste time and order my gig now <fiverr link>

There are some interesting videos showcasing what you can get from fiverr. I enjoyed these two: search for "samuraiguitarist fiverr" and "draw with jazza fiverr".

This guy hired some people of fiverr to do a CSGO highlight video, I thought it was fairly interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDIA87zLN_Y

What are you talking about? There are so many legit people offering legit services there. Yes, many of them are first timers, but their site clearly lets you choose people based on reviews and ratings.

Not sure about the spam, but I regularly do jobs and for the money I pay, the value is great. I also think they streamlined the experience pretty well. I personally use the shotgun approach sometimes where I hire multiple designers and just use the result that I like the most.

May be but it does offer value to many of us. My wife used it extensively to help her proofreading her academic work, design better quality graphs and so on.

I used it to hire folks to record weird happy birthday wishes for my friends.

I am not surprised they are valued at 700M, I expect them to be in this business for a long time.

Youtube started as an easy place to watch pirated movies.

I've used it to hire editors, but most used it for lead generation. They would agree to do a very small job for $5 to comply with fiverr's requirements but anything over that generated referrals to an offsite rate card.

Like you said, it’s uncertain what % of the gigs are of the spammy variety. That said, we’ve used it for a lot of design work and manual processes.

I just spent $60 for some quick image work we needed, worked well and it is easier than trying to find someone long term.

How much of the "spam" is actually gigs to get thru big tech's anti-scrape filters?

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