Coding, Data Entry and Android Top 2011 Freelance Developer Trends

Freelancer.com, a large international outsourcing and crowdsourcing marketplace, has announced the most recent Freelancer Fast 50, a list of its fastest growing online job categories for the last quarter of 2011.

The Fast 50 charts the fastest moving job categories quarter by quarter, and provides an up-to-date account of jobs being commissioned over the Internet.

Improving market

According to the new Fast 50, software development jobs are up overall. Q4 2011 saw a strong increase in applications developed in C++, which were up 38 percent to 2,214. Java was up 36 percent to 2,513, C language development was up 27 percent to 1,953, .NET development also was up 27 percent to 346, and C# was up 20 percent to 2,124. However, PHP still dominates the Web and was up 13 percent to 28,872 online projects.

HTML5 jobs continued to grow strongly, up 41 percent to 1,585 jobs. HTML5 growth was far greater than that for Adobe’s Flash, which only grew six percent to 2,995 jobs. Moreover, Freelancer predicts that HTML5 will overtake Flash by mid-2012.

“As the largest outsourcing marketplace in the world with over three million freelancers and 1.3 million jobs posted to date, the Fast 50 provides unparalleled and timely insights into online job trends, success and failure in the product marketplace and market share in application support for a range of companies, technologies and products,” said Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer, in a statement.

In all, 134,820 jobs were posted in the fourth quarter of 2011, up from 114,000 jobs in Q3, Barrie said. “Overall, online projects were up over 18 percent for the quarter,” he said. “The sophistication and nature of jobs continues to amaze us as we see jobs outsourced in areas as diverse as astrophysics, genetic engineering and industrial design.”

Meanwhile, after a slow third quarter, Android jobs rose 33 percent to 2,454 in Q4. Apple iPhone jobs grew 18 percent to 3,682. And by the end of 2012, Android should be close to overtaking the iPhone for the rate of development of new applications, Freelancer officials said. Apple iPad jobs rose 22 percent to 1,692. BlackBerry jobs were flat – up two percent, but with volumes too low to register on the Fast 50. Also the report noted that Symbian and Windows Phone applications do not even move the dial. Nokia was down 19 percent to insignificant numbers. Amazon Kindle was up 27 percent but also on insignificant volumes, Freelancer said.

Data entry jobs grew significantly in Q4, up 54 percent from 10,146 to 15,651 jobs. Freelancer saw big growth in these jobs as entrepreneurial startups hired freelance teams to conduct market research, competitive analysis and build a variety of information services. Similarly, Microsoft Excel jobs were up 51 percent to 7,056, and data processing jobs were up 39 percent to 6,705.

Freelancer said cloud computing jobs continue to be too low to register on the Fast 50, but it is interesting to note that Amazon Web Services jobs were up 24 percent to 314. Yet Google App Engine jobs were down 19 percent to 151. Microsoft Windows Azure jobs were down 32 percent to a paltry 13 jobs.

In the social media space, Facebook jobs were up 29 percent to 7,947. Social networking jobs in general were up 26 percent to 5,276. Google+ jobs appeared for the first time, but were too low to register on the Fast 50 as yet with only 279 jobs. MySpace fell 35 percent.

Freelancer said Google’s Panda Update decimated content writing jobs in Q2 2011, before recovering strongly in Q3 2011. These jobs have pulled back in Q4 2011 with Google AdSense jobs plummeting 21 percent – from 1,051 to 826, scoring the biggest fall of all jobs for the quarter. Google AdSense topped the leader board for risers in Q3 2011, having risen 76 percent. Other big risers from last quarter were flat or fell; ghostwriting jobs were down 21 percent to 3,382, reviews were up nine percent to 2,251, and travel writing was down 47 percent.

The Freelancer outsourcing marketplace enables businesses to connect with more than three million independent professionals from all over the world. Employers can hire freelancers in areas such as software, writing, data entry and design, engineering and the sciences, sales and marketing, accounting and legal services. The average job is under $200 (£130), making Freelancer cost effective for small businesses, which often need a wide variety of jobs to be done, but cannot justify the expense of hiring full time.