

Ask HN: online Work a winner takes it all market? Elance vs. odesk - cked

Hello hacker news community,<p>I am a frequent user of marketplaces like Elance and odesk where I offer my services as a .NET developer. I thought a lot about the nature of hat market and how many platforms  we will have as the markets matures over the next 5 years. The main questions I would like to answer is if that market is a winner takes it all market and what are its characteristics. <p>For example Facebook is a winner in my opinion. It might get replaced but I do no see multiple social networks co-exist due to strong network effects and switching costs.<p>For online work and the current platforms available it is not so clear for me. I do not see a big advantage for a developer like me if I signed up with a platform having 15000 or 100000 projects. For a contractor it's kinda the same. A platform with 15000 or 100000 developers does not concern me. I do not see a strong network effect. Switching costs aren't so high as well. <p>I would expect to have maybe 4-5 big players worldwide. I don't see multiple platforms like over 50+ neither. It would be too hard to maintain for human in my point of view.<p>However, I have observed something interesting in the data Elance and odesk disclose for the market in USA and Canada. The past two years odesk seems to show a monthly growth rate which is way higher than the growth of Elance if you look at number of projects and number of service providers. I am not sure if odesk managed to steal a market share from Elance since both compani are growing. Anyway, if I look at the exponential growth (oconomy at odesk) it feels like that the reason for that growth can't be only operational excellence which brings me back to market effects/ dynamic.<p>If you have any more insights I would love to discuss with you because I am personally interested in topic. I think in the future online work will play a big role how humans work. <p>To sum up, will there be one player one
In that market which takes it all?<p>Is it just a money game? By money game I mean the player with the most funds will win? <p>A the end I want to apologize for my English. I am not a native speaker which stopped me from posting earlier, but I still hope m points are clear and we will have a good discussion. I am happy to answer any questions.
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teyc
One of the problems I heard is that people are concerned about what work
actually gets done at outsourcing sites.

Odesk's monitoring enables customers to know that work is actually being
completed in a distributed environment, while elance doesn't do that.

If that is the case, then it explains ODesk's growth.

~~~
cked
This is true but elance offers a monitoring software as well. Both companies
show a steady growth but odesk is way more successful in the last two years.
On top of that elance started the market entry in European countries. However
odesk seems to grow twice as fast as elance.

Is the outsourcing market in USA and Canada still growing that fast? Seems
that odesk is stealing from elance AND is drawing from network effects or a
different market effect which could be a indicator that it is a winner takes
it all market

