Freelancer.com buys vWorker job site for tech professionals

PanARMENIAN.Net - Freelancer.com, the job outsourcing and freelance IT worker marketplace, has made another acquisition: it has bought vWorker, a job site for freelance coders and other tech professionals, TechCrunch reported.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed but TechCrunch said it has heard from a source that it is in the region of millions of dollars. vWorker was formerly known as RentACoder, and is said to be the fourth-biggest IT recruitment marketplace of its kind globally, with 2.5 million enterprise and professional users from around the world, and altogether processing $139 million from 1.3 million projects.

The deal is a sign of ongoing consolidation in the area of online freelance IT recruitment: it follows another acquisition made in July 2012, when Freelancer.com bought the world’s fifth-largest IT marketplace, Scriptlance.

Together with vWorker, Freelancer.com now has 6.6 million IT and tech professionals on its books globally covering some 600 categories of IT-related work. Freelancer says this makes it the world’s biggest IT outsourcing site for freelancers. Other competitors in the space include eLance and ODesk.

Freelancer.com lets companies post jobs to freelancers, but, in a hat tip to the big trend these days for crowdsourcing, it also has structured its site to let individual workers collaborate together on projects. Freelancer.com says the average job on the site is $200 or less — an interesting price point, considering how hard and expensive it can be these days to hire full-time engineers and other IT staff.

The deal will give Freelancer.com — originally founded in Australia by Matt Barrie, who still runs the company — further inroads into the U.S., with vWorker headquartered in Tampa, Florida. While vWorker focused mainly on programming and other IT work when it first opened for business in 2001, in 2010 it expanded into other areas of tech business, such as graphic design. Hence, the rebranding to vWorker, which the company says stands for “virtual worker.”

Originally focusing on programming and IT-based work, in 2010 the site expanded to include a wide selection of work categories including graphic design, writing and more. To reflect this expansion, the company changed its name to vWorker – short for “virtual worker”.

In a post announcing the news, Freelancer.com says that existing people on vWorker’s books will be automatically transitioned to Freelancer.com, effective immediately. “We will transfer over your account balances, user profiles, reputation history, messages, employer escrow payments, active projects and past projects, so rest assured that it will be business as usual once you arrive on our platform,” it says.