A quick review for freelancing sites revealed a bunch of exciting material.
Besides the wide range of commissions charged, multiplicity of said sites and all the consequences arising from that, one particular thing has drawn my attention.

The two sites - GetACoder.com and GetAFreelancer.com - look very much alike. Closer examination showed even more stunning similarities - the sites are word-for-word copies of each other (except dynamic content, of course). They were definitely inviting for further investigation.

First let’s look at WHOIS data.

GetAFreelancer is all-Swedish, just like they show it quite openly throughout their website. Even the bad English stylistics in some places (those probably having undergone upgrades in-house after initial cloning) gives them away. GetACoder is Arizona, USA based.

Domain creation/exp dates:

• GetACoder.com
  • Created on: 16-Aug-03
  • Expires on: 16-Aug-07
• GetAFreelancer.com
  • Creation Date: 09-Dec-2003
  • Expiration Date: 09-Dec-2006

Nothing special here: GetAFreelancer is a clear “descendant”. And both companies don’t take their businesses very seriously - they both prolong their domains only for the year immediately ahead.

Google PR (PageRank) for the two is a bit confusing though. It is a moderate “5″ for the presumably “original” GetACoder and a respectful “7″ for the “descendant”.
Well, this might just confirm the notion of Google PR being very relative measure of site’s popularity. Really, since PR is based mainly upon the number of “votes” (inbound links), GetACoder might have suffered from negative voting of unsatisfied coders which are treated like shit by GetACoder with it’s TOS governing project fee charges right after project start, with no guarantees of payments for the job.

How is negative vote cast? It’s easy. When you write an article about a site in question just don’t make a hyperlink to it - only mention the site’s name. (A reader-friendly alternative would be to include a normal link with the attribute of ‘rel=”nofollow”‘, which is an effective “negative vote”.) At the same time do hyperlink to the good sites in the same article so that your “voting balance” is shifted towards them.

Now the most inspiring finding.

I’ve found just about exactly what I subconsciously was expecting to find: a project titled “EXACT clone of getacoder.com” on… right, on GetAFreelancer! here

It is no surprise that many project on all the freelancer sites devoted to website design start with the words “I want a clone of …” Yet this one was definitely over the roof. Well, almost: the project isn’t on the GetACoder itself…

This is the ominous reality of freelancing venture.

So what a good coder/freelancer to do? Which agent to choose? Which one to award more respect?

Looks like one of the ways to go - as suggested by the mentioned findings - is… to build a freelancing job site. Yes, this may even explain their multiplicity. After all, GetAFreelancer declared more than $4M of turnover for a year’s term, which in all probability translates into some $100-400K net profit per year. Not too bad given the announced budget for “EXACT clone of getacoder” of “$100-300″…



Categories: Business, On the Web.
Published on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006
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