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Why I left an online freelancing agency
I’ve been a freelance writer for a lot of years, starting with magazines I was steered to by the writers’ group I was involved with and moving on to start my own writing business with a friend, then three years later taking it solo.
Finding magazines became much harder a few years ago when everything either dried up or went digital or got all their content in-house. Finding clients for ghostwriting was always difficult. Then at some point during the tail end of the recession I read a blog post that listed several different online temp agencies — at least that’s how I see them. They pair up clients and freelancers around the world. I chose the agency that sounded like the best fit and I stayed with them through three — or maybe three and a half — incarnations. (By which I mean the agency kept changing its name.)
When I started, I believe it was wide open. The jobs were listed by category and a freelancer could apply for as many as they had time to go through the process of applying for and interest in doing so.
This system changed with one of the changes of the agency name, and became a system where the agency allowed a certain number of points per month for freelancers to use in and after that either the writer got a membership for $5 a month or possibly paid per job they applied for. I don’t know because I never got to the…
