The Freelance Market After The Tools Got Good
The freelance market was supposed to be the clearest winner here. A small operator with good tools can now deliver what used to require a studio, and the overhead that makes agencies expensive is exactly what a freelancer does not carry. The first half of that argument held. The second half has not worked out the way anybody assumed.
The first half of that is true. The second half has not worked out the way the argument assumed.
What happened to the freelance market
Two things at once, and their order matters. Capacity rose, so a freelancer could take more work. Then rates fell, because clients understood what the tools had done to the time involved and repriced accordingly.
Where the second moved further than the first, the freelancer is working more for less. That is the common experience among people selling execution, and it is not a failure of their skill.
Being three times faster is only good news if the price does not fall by more than two thirds.
Who is doing well
Specialists whose value is a judgement a client cannot form: the person who knows a category, the one with a relationship that predates the brief, and anyone whose work depends on being physically somewhere.
Also, unglamorously, the people who moved from selling hours to selling an outcome before clients repriced the hours.
What this means for agencies
A freelance pool that is cheaper, larger and considerably more volatile, with the best people harder to book because they have reorganised around fewer, better clients.
Agencies treating freelancers as surge capacity will find the surge available and the quality uneven. The ones who kept paying properly through the repricing will find their list still answers the phone, which is going to look like foresight and was mostly just decency.
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