I’m sorry you were a bit miffed at my post; I was at yours as well – basically because you referred to my post but, except for the page load issue, your points were irrelevant to what I posted. The net effect was that you appeared to “disagree” with me, as you state now in this post, and implied that something you said disproved my points. But you didn’t — we were talking apples and oranges.

And that’s why I ASKED (not assumed) whether you worked for Elance. It was a perfectly logical question. Maybe an analogy will help you understand:

Say we’re hanging at a bar, and I say, “Dang, that girl has a huge butt.” Now, imagine my confusion, if you replied, “Well, I have to disagree with you, Ron. That other girl over there has a huge butt, and girls can pay for liposuction to remove extra fat. Also, that’s my sister, and she’s a real nice girl.”

I’d assume you were biased, and I could understand you being upset that I talked about your sister, but nothing you said was relevant to whether your sister had a big butt.

The fact is, I haven’t “disagreed” with anything you said. Yes, you can pay even more for extra bid credits, duh. Yes, a prudent Elance bidder would waste hours researching buyer history before using a precious bid; I implied as much. Whatever.

And you haven’t disagreed with anything I said. Our different bandwidth experiences aren’t disagreements; they’re just different experiences. Yet, for some reason (I assumed bias from way you seemed to intentionally re-frame the discussion in a more favorable light for Elance), you seem to think we’re disageeing.

Bottom line regarding my opinion of the two sites: Elance is better in many ways than Guru, but none, except mediation, that put any more money in my pocket. I make more money on Guru. Elance has lots of neat bells and whistles, but it has to because the business model sucks. Not only does it provide less than 40% of the opportunities to win business that Guru does, but the high value placed on Elance bid credits creates an ugly potential for conflict of interest.

So, rather than agreeing to disagree, let’s just agree we’re talking about different subjects and not frame irrelevant arguments as, somehow, overwhelming the other person’s points. I will, if you will.

r

As to whether my opinons are “full of holes,” I leave that up to those that read them to decide. I merely offer a different perspective than the one you have posted.

Regarding your comments:

“I also use Firefox, and have never had any trouble loading the site, or experienced long load times.”

Cool, it may be my PC, as I stated, I just thought it significant that it doesn’t happen on Guru. I guess readers will just have to judge for themselves.

“on Elance, you can easily acquire more ‘bid credits’ or ‘connects’ as the site calls them for a small fee.”

Duh. Yes, both sites will gladly sell you more bid credits, but that’s irrelevant to my post. The fact is that it costs a lot more to bid on a project on Elance:

Guru costs $25 for 100 bids, each project is one bid. Elance charges $10 for 20 bids, and some projects require up to 4 bid credits. Do you understand now?

You said:
On Elance, job posters are required to maintain a percentage of jobs awarded or they are not allowed to continue to post. Think about it this way, however – in the world of query letters and job posts, what is the percentage of jobs that are actually awarded? At least Elance allows you to check the job poster’s profile beforehand in order to see whether they have a history of awarding or not. In the ‘real world’ we have no such metrics.

WOW, you must not have understood my post. First, the “world of query letters and job posts” are two different worlds. The major difference being that the job boards we are talking about CHARGE you to bid. Sending query letters is free.

And yes, you can research an employer’s buying history on Elance — more of that wasted time I talked about that you’re obligated to do because a project can cost you as much as $2 to bid on Elance (always only 40 cents on Guru). But many, many of the jobs are posted by relatively new employers – it is the exact nature of freelancing and these job boards that people with one-time projects use them to find a provider. If you restricted your bids to only employers with at least, say, 75% award rate, you’d probably never use all of your Elance bids. Even employers with 50% award rates are rare.

Do you know what that award percentage has to be?

But, I know better examples. For instance, there has been an “employer” who kept posting the same job – on both Guru and Elance. Over and over, sometimes twice a day, and never awarding it. Most providers figured it out and quit bidding, but still, every job post conned a few newbies out of their hard-earned money. The job boards could not stop him because he kept re-registering as a new user.

Obviously, he was a con artist and not the site management. But think about it. Why can’t the site do the same thing, except change the project description so it isn’t so obvious. I guarantee that Elancers and Gurus will bid whether the “employer” has a good buying history or not.

Naive writers deserve protection just as much as us astute people.

Look at the numbers:

It is not unusual for an Elance project to attract 30 or more bids. One bogus project could produce up to $60 in revenue for doing basically nothing. According to the site’s marketing, they post around 25,000 projects a month. If only 5% were bogus, I doubt anyone would ever notice. But if each of those made only $30, the company would get about $38,000 of free revenue each month.

I think you’d have to be naive to think that they don’t do that – especially when you consider that it’s also great marketing to pump up their project numbers – it makes it look like there is more opportunity and more on their site than the competition, so more freelancers sign up.

Bottom line: Both sites could be doing this, but Elance’s business model – higher per bid cost + multiple credits requred for some projects – makes it more likely that they are. Since I rarely even use up the 100 Guru bids each month, and I suspect others don’t either, it obviously doesn’t matter to me if some projects are bogus.

As for this:

“I find it important to avoid generalizing personal experiences with job sites.”

r