What is Fiverr?

What is Fiver?

 By: Bilal Kamal     Topic:  Fiver&Blog    More Post About:   Up work,Fiver,Blogging,SEO

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It's amazing what $5 can get you. On Fiver, a freelancer platform where users can sell just about any service imaginable for as little as five bucks, it's typical to see people offer graphic design help or resume-editing services in exchange for the nominal fee.

But if you're willing to dig a little deeper into the site, Vice reports, you can also avail yourself of all sorts of illegal spying services.

An investigation by Vice found a variety of gig listings on Fiverr's platform that promise to invade the privacy of others. In some cases, listings offered to sell customers spying malware that can be installed on a person's phone in order to track their location and document their activity on the device, including recording keystrokes and web history. The listing offered several variations of the malicious spyware, including versions that reportedly target a person's passwords and attempt to gain access to their emails and other forms of communication. "I have undetectable spyware to monitor your cheating spouse," one of the listings reportedly read.

The services went even further, too: Other providers offered to go so far as to put a tracking device on a person's vehicle for a small fee and report on every location that they visited for an entire week. The listing came from a person who claimed to work for a firm that specializes in divorce matters and additionally offered video and photographic evidence of the person's location if needed, per Vice. Another listing similarly promised to physically follow a person and document their behavior in an attempt to catch "cheating" partners. Others simply offered to dig through a person's social media history and any other digital information they could get their hands on.

Fiverr has since removed some of the listings, including those that sell illegal and malicious software and offer physical tracking of a person's location. However, the unauthorized "personal investigator" listings remain. According to Vice, the company rationalized keeping the listing online because the person is "offering search services that come from public sources, like social media or Google searches."

Mic found that when searching for a "private investigator" on Fiver, among the first results is a person offering to snoop on significant others. The person claims to specialize in "relationship infidelity" and offers to dig through a person's social media presence as well as "offline interaction and in person" behaviors if requested. "A warning that this might end your relationship is necessary as I usually do find significant evidence," the listing states. Dozens of other, similar listings pop up when searching for "cheating spouse" and "cheating partner."

These types of services are pretty common online, even outside of Fiverr. The internet is littered with spying services, almost always targeted at people who want to catch their partner in the act of cheating. Malware that can be put on a person's phone or other device to track their activity and steal everything from their text messages to their photos can be bought online for a couple hundred bucks. Private investigator services can also be found relatively easily online if you go looking for them. These types of services are incredibly problematic, not just because they are often illegal, but because they also enable all sorts of dangerous behaviors, including stalking and partner abuse.

But bad actors have been an ongoing issue for the freelancer platform. In the past, sellers on Fiverr have offered to boost follower and view counts on social media, using bots and other fake accounts to do so. Lawyers have raised warning flags about cheap legal services on offer, claiming the practices are potentially illegal as most of the sellers have not passed the bar exam and aren't certified to practice law. Some sellers offer to write essays and do homework for students, which almost certainly violates academic rules set forth by most schools and universities.

Perhaps most notably, Fiverr was dinged by Amazon after the giant online marketplace discovered thousands of Fiverr users selling fake reviews for products — a situation that resulted in Amazon suing Fiverr for allowing those services on its platform. (The irony of Amazon itself playing host to its fair share of fraudulent sellers shouldn't be lost.) Fiverr acknowledged its struggle to moderate its sprawling platform in its Securities and Exchange Commission filing earlier this year, writing: "While we have adopted policies regarding illegal or offensive use of our platform by our users and retain authority to remove user-generated content that violates our policies, users could nonetheless engage in these activities."

Still, the spying services are troubling on their own: They're almost certainly illegal, encourage the invasion of individuals' privacy, and prey upon humans' worst instincts and paranoia. If things feel off in your relationship and you're harboring suspicions, try talking to your partner honestly about your concerns and explaining where your fears are coming from. Feeling that your trust may have been broken is not an excuse to hire an internet stranger to blatantly violate your partner's privacy.

Fiverr is the latest freelancer company to go public, several months after fellow gig-economy company Up work hit the market. Debuting at $26 per share (already over 23% higher than their initial pricing at $18 to $20), Fiverr stock is already trading up over 75% as of intraday trading. The company is mimicking online shopping services by creating a marketplace for companies to buy freelance services—with a starting cost of $5 per job. According to the company’s F-1 filing, the company’s target price gave Fiverr an estimated value of around $650 million.

But, why is the millennial freelance company making such a splash?

Fiverr, much like competitor Up work, provides a platform for “buyers” (companies) and “sellers” (freelancers) to trade digital services in a freelance capacity. Dubbed the “gig-economy,” companies like Fiverr have picked up on the increase in freelancing or remote positions on the market—and are starting to capitalize on it.

But it appears Wall Street may be slightly less bullish on the “gig economy’s” potential. In fact, competitor Up work’s shares rocketed up some 50% on their first day of trading back in October, but have since slumped to near their IPO price at around $15 per share.

And with the losses Fiverr is sustaining (some $1.26 per share for the 1st quarter), some investors are wary.

“The losses are really an issue here, but they’re not that large—they lost about $25 million in 2019 and it’ll be about the same in 2020, but it’s going to be until 2022 at least until we see profitability,” said Kathleen Smith, principal at Renaissance Capital, a provider of institutional research and IPO ETFs.“That’s a negative, so this company is going to have to show growth and at least some directional moves toward profitability.”

Smith added that the problem with competitor Up work was that “investors have been kind of disappointed [with their reports] because the growth rates have not been as high as investors expected.”

But Fiverr is banking on the growing freelancer industry. In fact, recent statistics seem to back up the company’s bet.

According to recent studies, growth projections for freelancing are increasing 3.5% year-over-year. And according to Up work’s 2019 Future Workforce Report, some 74% of millennial and Gen Z managers have workers who work primarily remotely. And, according to the report, some 50% of managers increased their use of freelancers since 2016.

It’s clear that millennial and Gen Z workers are flocking to this new way of working, as nearly half of all millennial reportedly have a side-hustle, according to a new Bank rate survey.

According to Keith Ryu, CEO and co-founder of hourly hiring and recruiting platform Fountain, the overall workforce trend is something to be optimistic about going forward. “The direction in which work is evolving opens up a lot of new opportunities for innovation to curate large labor pools and generate consistent output, match talent with tasks and train and monitor on scalable levels,” Ryu told Fortune via email. “The gig-economy is growing three times faster than the overall U.S. workforce, while the number of gig workers in the U.S. is expected to double in the next four years.”

In fact, despite the fact that companies like Fiverr and Up work are still relatively small compared to other recent IPOs, experts suggest the future of the workforce is going remote.

“Fiverr’s brand is more a low-cost, global workforce that they’re connecting, and so I think overall it’s just reflective of what’s happening in the world of work,” said George Lacquer, founder and principal analyst at Hr Wins, an HR technology company. “Employers have consistently been expecting to increase their spend on [freelancers] year in, year out for 15 to 20 years. What these tools are doing … are providing a different kind of on-demand access to that talent.”

But what is less clear is how companies like Fiverr and Up work can generate cash from the industry.

“It concerns us that Fiverr, because they have small sales … that really means that there is a lot of turnover and they have to keep marketing to get new people,” Smith said.

“I wouldn’t compare [Fiverr] to Uber or Left mainly because Uber and Left have losses that are significantly larger,” Smith said. “[Fiverr] has losses [and] it’s spending a lot on sales and marketing, so I think with this one, investors are saying, ‘well, the losses aren’t that large and they’re expecting it to turn profitable.’”

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Whether or not Fiverr is destined to follow the same volatile path as other stocks like Lyft and Uber, analysts remain bullish on the gig-economy space the company caters to.

“What we’ve been calling the ‘human cloud’ is the next wave of available talent that’s been vetted by skill or certification that is what all the big staffing companies are focused on, and I think its representative of what a Fiverr is doing in providing available talent quickly,” Lacquer said. “I think that is where we’ll see a big impact in that space.”

Still, it seems Fiverr’s stock may have topped out. Smith claims the stock seems to have a “full valuation,” and that “investors should be cautious.”

The company is now trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “FIVRR.” Fiverr’s lockup period is 180 days, with underwriters including J.P. Morgan, UBS, Citigroup and more.

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