Freelancer.com Acquires Freemarket.com, Launches Online Marketplace for Virtual Goods

SYDNEY, July 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Freelancer.com, the world's largest outsourcing marketplace, today announced the acquisition of Freemarket.com and simultaneous launch of an online marketplace for buying and selling virtual goods. Stocked with content by Freelancer.com's rapidly growing user base of over 1.7 million registered professionals, Freemarket.com aims to be the world's top marketplace for buying and selling digital content.

The launch of Freemarket.com marks a major milestone for Freelancer.com, who up until today focused on providing a marketplace for remote workers. "This is a giant step for us," said Freelancer.com Chief Executive Matt Barrie. "Freemarket.com essentially doubles the options a small business person has for getting things done online. For example, a small business might choose to purchase a website template from Freemarket.com and have it customized by a freelancer from Freelancer.com. As a result, the website will be up and running faster, be potentially more cost effective and have higher certainty towards the final outcome.  It's great for freelancers as they can now generate multiple passive income streams while they sleep," he continued.

Freemarket.com has been in private beta for a couple of weeks, and already over five thousand items of content have been uploaded. "The strength of Freemarket.com will be that content will be powered by our massive user base of talented freelancers," commented Barrie.

Investment banking firm Piper Jaffray estimates that by 2013 the online virtual goods market will be worth in excess of $6 billion globally, with over $2.5 billion in revenue generated in the US alone. While much of this has been focused on the consumer, Freemarket.com is the world's first digital one-stop-shop for small business.

Freemarket.com is open now for anyone to upload digital content for sale.

About Freelancer

Freelancer.com is the largest outsourcing marketplace in the world. Through Freelancer.com, businesses connect with independent service providers and freelancers. Freelancer.com connects over 1.7 million professionals from over 234 countries & regions. Through our website, employers can hire freelancers to do work in areas such as software, writing, data entry and design right through to engineering and the sciences, sales & marketing, and accounting and legal services. The average job is under US$200, making Freelancer.com extremely cost effective for small businesses, which often need a wide variety of jobs to be done, but cannot justify the expense of hiring full time.

How would your business change if you had virtually unlimited labor at next to no cost?

For more information: http://www.freelancer.com

SOURCE Freelancer.com