Freelancer celebrates hitting 25 million users with largest ever crowdsourcing challenge

FREELANCER.com, the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace, reached 25 million users, over taking the population of its native Australia.

To celebrate the achievement, it is launching a prize pool of US$25,000 to be given away through what is anticipated to be the largest crowdsourcing challenge in its history.

Over the next month, users from Freelancer.com’s 247 countries, regions and territories will be asked to participate in a simple crowdsourcing task – download the company’s hummingbird logo and promote it.

India remains the largest nationality, making up five million of Freelancer.com’s users. Next comes the US with 3.2 million, with Brazil, UK, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines, Australia, Bangladesh and Canada making up the top 10. The US, UK, Canada and Australia make up the top employers on the site.

On a typical day Freelancer receives over 12,000 new users and more than 8,000 new projects.

And with 94 bids from freelancers and 360 messages sent, a lot happens in a Freelancer minute.

Freelancer supports 34 languages including Spanish, Russian, Thai, Magyar and Bahasa Indonesia. Along with 28 currencies from the most common like Aussie dollar, US dollar, British pound and euro, through to the likes of the Singaporean dollar, Brazilian real, Danish krone and Japanese yen.

Since its inception in 2009, Freelancer.com has grown to become the world’s largest online freelancing and crowdsourcing platform by total number of users and jobs posted.

More than 12.28 million projects in total have been posted ranging from designing a VR headset through to building a recipe marketplace from the ground up. Some of the latest additions in skills have been in the growing fields of Bitcoin and mixed realities.

It is not just ambitious entrepreneurs tapping into global expertise on the Freelancer.com site, as 70 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies use the platform to hire freelancers.

Some of the most inspirational crowd sourcing challenges have come from NASA who use freelancers to solve complex problems that astronauts face on the International Space Station and will face in deep space missions. For more detail see the contests live on the site. “We know that a lot of people rely on the platform as their primary source of income or the tool to power their business idea,” Freelancer.com chief executive officer (CEO) Matt Barrie said on the milestone.