Freelancer.com and why did it buy Escrow.com? — What is
Publicly traded freelance marketplace owns a number of businesses, counting a website and domain name marketplace.
Yesterday (United States time), Freelancer.com disclosed that it purchased Escrow.com for US $7.5 million.
Freelancer.com is a publicly traded firm in Australia with a market cap of regarding $450 million, but many people probably aren’t familiar with it.
The firm is similar to oDesk/eLance, where people post jobs they need done and freelancers bid to complete the work.
Freelancer.com owns a number of freelance communities and is working to consolidate the community. In fact, last year it purchased the popular internet marketing forum Warrior Forum. Last year it also purchased:
- SydStart – an Austraian startup conference and community
- Zlecenia.przez.net – freelance marketplace in Poland
- Fantero – virtual content marketplace
The firm also owns Freemarket.com, a site for buying and selling websites and domain names. Escrow.com obviously fits it nicely here, and Escrow.com’s client list could be used for co-marketing and boosting this site’s presence among domain name investors.
A number of freelance sites use escrow systems for handling payments, so it’s possible Escrow.com could be integrated.
Freelancer.com boasts 15 million registered users. It states $2.7 billion worth of projects have been posted on all of its marketplaces since 2001. (One of its sites was GetAFreelancer, which purchased the Freelancer.com domain name in 2009.)
The firm takes just a modest sliver of each project, so its topline revenue number isn’t that high. It takes 0-3% from the person who posts the project and 0-10% from the freelancer. It also charges membership fees.
All of this added up to AUD $26.1M in the last financial year on AUD $103.7M in transactions, and a slight loss for the firm.
Freelancer.com has been an Escrow.com client. It used the service for the Warrior Forum transaction.
