Also, I don´t think they will jack up the prices. Everything is moving towards 0% on all global transactions. Rather the opposite: They will offer enterprise solution with 0% commission pretty soon.
I run a curated freelancing platform for creatives called Coworks. Being part of the industry it's really interesting to read your thoughts on the merger. Even though I've followed them very closed for two years as a competitor I was really surprised by the move. My take on it is: 1. They can lower their acquisition costs by not competing with PPC and in their content marketing. 2. Their real competitors, who are still sleeping behind the wheel, are Manpower, Randstad etc. With the merger they get the muscles to battle them for the online staffing market. 3. Last but not least- they'll ditch one of the platforms (elance?) and save half the money on Tech.
got this thread from a friend (Nodesocket). I am usually cautious about promoting myself in threads like this since it is almost impossible not to sound spammy. BUT with that said I will do it anyway for a simple reason; a bunch of you have pointed out the challenge with quality, vetting, good vs cheap freelancers.
I started Coworks because I had such a huge need of great freelancers, and couldn't find a good way to find and manage quality people. (This is my 4th startup, so I bought a lot of freelancing work over the years)
And I do think we have solved a bunch of these issues with Coworks. We are entirely built on social recommendations, manual curation and are explicitly not targeting "cheap" freelancers. It is still early days, but our first customers seems to like us. (This is how it works https://coworks.com/works)