So after hearing @Ony mention it I decided to look into this site Fiverr.com and I’m really not sure what to think of it.
For one, I’m immediately suspect of what you can get for five dollars and expect it to all be bull crap. Like a person says they’ll make a website for five dollars so then you pay them, but actually you find out that they just say five dollar when really it’s $500 and I should have known that because that’s how this site works.
Then on the flip side if it is indeed a person in some third world country doing stuff like that for $5 isn’t that exploitative of me to pay them that?
Or is it actually ethical because the alternative is no work at all?
Or maybe it’s a situation where these people have what they do so stream lined that they can indeed throw together a website in 10 minutes making $5 totally worth it.
Or maybe it’s people trying to build a portfolio.
Then there is of course massive concerns with security. When you pay someone $5 for a website, I can see how they would be very tempted to steal from you, hack you, or exploit you right back. Not to mention that after looking around there for five minutes I already saw an ad to give five star ratings on Google and Apple stores from some guy in Pakistan. So yeah, it doesn’t look like the site is populated solely by ethical users.
If you feel it’s exploitative or unethical, then simply don’t use it. And on the other side of that, if a person values their skills at such a low value, they either don’t know the true value of their skills, or their skills have no value. Do you really want a barely functioning website? Or do you want something that will work and is totally to spec?
You get what you pay for.
“A fiver to make me a forum avatar” sure thing. “A fiver to make a fully functional commercial website”, is not going to work out.
What do I think? I think it’s a site I wouldn’t ever go near for the jobs related to this forum, if anything for that matter.
It’s not that hard to find actual professionals willing to do a good job for whatever you want.
I wouldn’t pay a fiver for something as important as a website. I’ll need some small UI features soon though and might give it a try for that, the risk to yourself as a customer is >=5 which is the only selling point I can see.
I don’t see it as exploitative or immoral - The people on Fiverr are advertising a service that costs a base price of five (whatever currency it is). If the price they believe to be fair is a base of that then so be it. If you want to pay more than the base price, I am sure they’ll be happy to take more money for their services.
If you want an aesthetically pleasing basic website (that is cheap) to start things off with, I suggest using Wordpress with GoDaddy by the way. I did that and I think that my site looks good, even if the person making it (myself) didn’t make it properly. I’ll probably have to get a more professional site in the future though.
I’ve used fiverr before sometimes with good results sometimes mediocre. To be honest there are things on the Asset Store that cost 5 dollars as well.
On fiverr the things that I have had the best results for are the things that you don’t get exclusive rights to. In one particular example I got around a 15 second video intro that’s very nice looking for my company to display at the beginning of our games. What do you get for 5 bucks? Essentially your company logo stuck into the professional looking canned intro that the artist spent a lot of time creating. How does this make sense to the artist? Well he or she has sold it over 500 times so that’s a serious return on his investment. To me this makes sense.
Another example is the app store logo for the game down in my signature Zany bounce (this I wanted to be unique). A lot of artists on there start at $5 but have additionals. In my particular case the logo cost $25 and I’d say it’s an average logo. My budget was quite low at the time and it was my first game so I didn’t expect or need it to be great. I got an average looking logo for $25 on fiverr. Does this make sense to the artist? Generally speaking, her queue seems quite full all the time and if you you order rush delivery and other things I’d say her average selling of a logo is probably around $15. She also seemed to spit out 6-8 a day at the time. As an struggling indie myself I can see where this would at least let ends meet.
To be honest it seems like a thriving marketplace and I see nothing wrong with it. You certainly aren’t going to find super high end stuff there but in that respect I guess it’s the Walmart of indie marketplaces and that seems perfectly fine (which also means a decent amount of generic stuff not worth the value as well).
9 out of 10 Fiverr sellers just recycle garbage ripped from the internet.
Hire like 5 or 6 of them to do the same thing, get refunds from the morons that try to do that, then get upgrade packs from the ones that are actually legit.
It basically works like “Gimme 5 bucks, I’ll give you something, then if you like it you buy an upgrade for $20 - $100.”. It’s like a $5 sales pitch website. For five bucks they’ll prove that they can actually do something for you but you have to throw more money at them to do anything useful.
Most of the time they’ll return some crap they put zero effort into, freak out when you give them a bad review for it (because they stole copyrighted images or used an automatic generator from the internet) and throw a refund at you… There’s some talent on there, you just have to weed through the idiots and stay away from products/services that you clearly couldn’t use this business model on.
I can’t say if this or true or not that 90% isn’t legit since I tended to stay to the highly reviewed ones and had ok results (and nothing stolen since I checked). But I would say that at least 1/3 of the searches are obvious that they’re trying to either give you very little effort or are stealing other’s work.
In that respect I guess it’s more like a flea market than Walmart, you shouldn’t be surprised if you bought a gucci handbag for $20 and it’s not authentic. You get what you pay for and you’re not paying a lot. The stuff that make sense sometimes is of good quality on the cheap though and if you have the patience you can probably make a low budget go a long way and get good results.
I used Fiverr years ago shortly after it first came out with good results. I hired folks to do research, to create graphics and to write articles.
You just have to look at it the way I view all of life… it is just a test. An experiment. If I used it now I’d do the same thing. Use $20 and hire four people to build a $5 website. Then compare the results. Now I know if they all deliver junk. Odds are one of them will actually deliver something usable. A solid foundation.
You just have to use your head when using something like Fiverr. Run tests and separate the wheat from the chaff. Then continue using the good ones.
I think for the majority of the people there(except for maybe the ones where $5 is actually a lot of money to them) have something set up. Someone mentioned a logo being thrown into a pre-canned video that was worked hard on. You could easily have some pre-set materials and animations set up in Blender for a text shatter/rotation/whatever and just change the text really quick. And many logos can be rotoscoped pretty quickly too. These are the kinds of things I see being worth making money on as an artist, assuming you know how, and are using software that let’s you pre-can most of the things in order to save the time.
Why don’t you just use external shop/payments systems that take small percentage. If you do everything on your site you will be responsible of security and everything.
Look into Wordpress and Woocommerce for example, pretty easy to set up. There’s lots of WC compatible themes or making one compatible is quite easy as well. The same with payment gateways, there’s a gazillion paid ones but also writing one yourself is pretty straightforward.
I wouldn’t really handle credit cards and stuff myself, better to use paypal or some other similar provider.
Or if you don’t want to mess with this stuff, there are services like Shopify.
I wouldn’t really trust someone from that site to do this kind of work, because with a store you’ll more than likely need future support and so on. Better to DIY, hire a decent firm or use some service geared towards stuff like this in my opinion.
I guess its going to depend on the person but you can get alright stuff. I think it could be good for voice overs (if you needed like a movie guy for your trailer or something).
Personally I don’t love the fiverr thing very much. I tried to some video maker there for creating some fresh content, but it turns out to be a mess. Not sure if I should have more test there later.
The only one I have used is the Voice Acting Alliance for some previous work and found it very good. I was really pleased with who I ended up casting. I suggest trying it out in the future.
Thoroughly entertaining.