Elance Answers Writers’ Pleas

Written by James - 3 Comments

This morning’s email from Elance.com outlined changes to their membership plans and fees. Feedback and complaints from writers about the 300% fee increase sent Elance scrambling for solutions.

Elance’s solutions to the problems writers face doing business on the megasite include:

Cheaper cost of bidding on projects
No Premier plan gold seal expense to writers ($20/month) for three months
Eliminated buyer budget option of “less than $250, replacing with “less than $500″
Revised number of bid connects for certain plans

That’s it. No lower fees. No reimbursed connects when a buyer doesn’t award the project or disappears into the sunset. No one-shot fee for the Premier stamp of approval.

I’m not impressed.

Elance believes the average cost to win a $341 project is $6.70. That may be the cost of Elance, but that is not the actual cost of winning a project. The time and effort involved to search for jobs, prepare a proposal, and negotiate with buyers are all factors of earning a living as a writer. If a writer spends one to three hours just trying to win one project… well. You do the math.

Elance pointed out that it takes an average of 10 bids to land one job in a month. A writer can easily lose ten work hours (and probably closer to 20) just bidding and writing proposals.

The Water Cooler over at Elance hasn’t lit up yet. Elance slipped out the email at night – smart move. Every writer with a paid membership will wake up to the glowing news: The cost of doing business on Elance hasn’t changed, and the condescending solutions Elance offers are just pats on the head.

Poor writer… there, there… poor writer…

3 Responses to “Elance Answers Writers’ Pleas”

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Amanda Evans

November 16, 2007 at 8:23 am

It seems like Elance is just trying to pretend that they are listening to us writers. They are not taking any notice at all as far as I can see. A few extra connects in your membership plan is not going to solve this problem. The problem is that fact that they have increased membership prices without any warning and let’s face it, they didn’t just come up with this overnight.

I think like most other writers I will be checking out the other websites that are on offer and more than likely changing my Elance membership to the free one just to keep my profile active.

I will be posting details of the competing websites on my blog The Hidden Writer over the next couple of days too.

Amanda

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Naomi Dunford

November 16, 2007 at 11:50 pm

I cannot even imagine the impact this is going to have. I don’t use Elance but I’ve recommended it – even to my Mom! I’ll be checking back for updates…

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Harry

November 17, 2007 at 3:01 pm

I think everyone will be looking for alternatives, this is just ridiculous. It’s also very typical of what I’ve seen in big business. Changes are made with no regard to how it affects people like us, the only thing concerning companies like Elance is their bottom line. The sad part is, they’ll go through with their changes regardless of what everyone says, and in fact, they already have as noted in Jamie’s post today. Elance wrote a few nice words, gave people a false sense of security, made them think they were being heard on the subject, and in reality, haven’t done a damned thing to improve the situation.

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