Today oDesk, an online marketplace and platform for managing remote work, announced that it was lowering its transaction fee from 23% to 10%, citing improved operational efficiency, increased customer adoption, and revenue growth as key enablers.

The oDesk Marketplace has recently achieved several milestones reflecting growing adoption of the platform by buyers and providers, including 500,000 hours billed, 6,000 providers registered, 1,000 jobs posted per month, and 5,000 skills tests taken. This growth, coupled with operational improvements, has allowed oDesk to pass savings back to its buyers and providers.

In the past year, our business has grown dramatically and we're getting more efficient," said Gary Swart, CEO of oDesk. "Our customers told us they'd bring us more business if we lowered our fees, and we realized we could do it. With this price decrease, we believe any business can cost-effectively use oDesk to hire, manage, and pay high quality service providers anywhere in the world."

The oDesk Marketplace makes it easy to find and hire high quality remote service providers at globally competitive hourly rates. oDesk's pioneering platform offers an unprecedented level of transparency and payment simplicity - a complete solution for successful remote work relationships.

Recently selected as one of 13 leading Web 2.0 companies to demo at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, oDesk enables businesses of all sizes to access the worldwide market for technology expertise. The oDesk global network includes thousands of programmers, system administrators, web designers, technical writers, and QA engineers from countries around the world including Russia, Ukraine, India, and the US. Hiring managers can search online profiles of oDesk professionals using a variety of search criteria including technical skills, hourly rate, feedback scores, tests passed, previous work history, and geography.