Freelancer.com Announces 2010 Freelancer Fast 50, Predicts 2011 Trends

SYDNEY, Jan. 27, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Freelancer.com, the world's largest outsourcing marketplace which connects small business with freelancers from around the world, today announced their findings on the fastest growing online outsourcing jobs with the release of the 2010 Freelancer Fast 50.

The Freelancer.com Fast 50 charts the top 50 rising job categories in the online labor market quarter by quarter. The 2010 Freelancer Fast 50 is the amalgamation of those results for the year.

"As the largest outsourcing marketplace with over 2 million users and 900,000 outsourced projects to date, we are uniquely positioned to commentate on jobs conducted online," said Matt Barrie, Chief Executive of Freelancer.com. "For the 2010 Freelancer Fast 50, we examined over 320,000 jobs posted on Freelancer.com, and found hard statistics related to a number of trends that are commentated on frequently in the press. We have a unique ability to gauge community and developer interest ahead of the traditional methods."

TOP TRENDS OF FREELANCER FAST 50

PHP Dominates the Web and Continues to Grow

PHP continues to be the dominant programming language of the web and is up 40% to a massive 61,813 projects in 2010, making it the top category for outsourcing on Freelancer.com and having the largest absolute growth in terms of numbers of projects gained. PHP based frameworks Zend (up 875%), CodeIgniter (up 980%), and CakePHP (up 551%) mirrored this, seeing triple digit growth but narrowly missed the Fast 50 cut due to the low volume.

It is well known that PHP is replacing traditional languages such as Perl (down 39% to 1,466), ASP (down 22% to 4,060) and C Programming (down 31% to 5,297). However, the surprise for the year was the lack of growth for would be challenger Ruby, which was flat (down 3% to 825 projects and missing the cut). Javascript bucked the trend being the primary client side language for PHP (up 42% to 13,678 projects).

With off-the-rack software such as Wordpress and Zencart continuing to use PHP as their language platform of choice it seems likely that it will maintain its position at the  top of the list for a long time to come.

Mobile Continues to Grow, Android to take the lead in 2011

Mobile was definitely the new black in 2010.  Back from the grave is Nokia with an unexpected and top of the charts growth of 8,700% to 880 projects; just missing out of the Fast 50 due to the low volume.

Objective C applications (iPhone +182% to 6,890, and iPad debuting at 2,656 projects) have seen significant growth (up 647% to 1,472) no doubt spurred on by the iPad and iPhone 4 releases.  Google's Android (up 501% to 2,813), expected to release a vast array of handsets this year is close behind and RIM's Blackberry rounded out the pack (up 446% to 1702).

Adobe's Flash is hurting (down 5% to 13,748 projects) thanks to Apple blocking it on their mobile platforms. Based on these growth rates, we expect to see Android projects overtake iPhone applications this year.

Microsoft in Broad Based Decline

Microsoft related projects are in strong decline across the board, with Windows Desktop applications crashing down 47% on 2009 figures to 1,994 projects and ASP down 22% to 4,060 projects. Visual Basic and .NET flat at up 6% (to 12,687) and 3% (to 3,660) respectively. Windows Mobile, Active Directory, MS Exchange, and Expression were all up but didn't make the Fast 50 due to very low project volumes. The only bright spot was C# programming, up 204% to 5,786 projects. Azure volumes were non-existent (35 projects).

Content is King, or is it?

Search on the Internet has never been more crucial to finding high quality products and services, and good search rankings have never been more valuable. In response to this there has been an  ever increasing focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) through search engine targeted content to ensure high rankings and maximum search exposure. As a result, we are seeing content churned out at a tremendous rate: article writing was up 410% to a whopping 35,853 projects in 2010; technical writing up 138% to 6,278, ghostwriting up 269% to 9,507, blog writing up 126% to 11,394, review writing up 444% to 6,419,  and article rewriting up 845% to 20,129 projects.

Recently in technology circles, there has been criticism that search results are becoming filled with too much irrelevant content. Is Content still King, or is Content the New Spam?

Social Networks Continue to Grow

Across the board, social networking applications continue to grow. Leading the pack are Facebook applications (up 364% to 11,585 projects), followed by Twitter (up 85% to 3,066), YouTube (up 276% to 2,836), and build-your-own social network platform SocialEngine (up 279% to 1,224 projects). Social Networking as a category itself was up 75% to 8,572 projects. MySpace trailed the pack but was still up 59% to 1,144 projects.

Sell, Sell, Sell

Selling on the Internet is alive and well. eBay projects were up a massive 791% to 3,983 in 2010. Shopping carts were strong with Magento taking the lead as the most popular shopping cart (up 182% to 3,679 projects), osCommerce was up 312% to 3,473, and Zen Cart up 377% to 1,444 projects. eCommerce projects were up 169% to 8,618.

This data was extracted from more than 320,000 projects posted on Freelancer.com in 2010 and excludes project volumes of less than 1,000.  The Freelancer.com Freelancer Fast 50 is the leading gauge of online hiring trends.

For more information visit:

http://www.freelancer.com

About Freelancer

Freelancer.com is the largest outsourcing market place in the world. Through Freelancer.com, businesses connect with independent service providers and freelancers. Freelancer.com connects over 2 million professionals from all over the world. 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 & 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.

SOURCE Freelancer.com