According to the U.S. Department of Labor, despite adding 162,000 jobs last month, the nationwide unemployment rate held steady at 9.7%. Data introduced today by Elance shows online work continues to grow at a steady pace as its talent pool earned more than $20 million in the first quarter of 2010, surpassing a total of $260 million of work completed to date on Elance. This represents a nearly 40% increase year-over-year and demonstrates that businesses are increasingly turning to online talent, an important and thriving employment segment, to drive their economic recovery.

Freelancer today smashed through 1.5 million registered professionals from 234 countries and regions worldwide./p>

Freelancer is now the most popular outsourcing website in the world for users and jobs, topping almost 1,100 jobs per day and 640,000 jobs posted to date.

Matt Barrie, Chief Executive of Freelancer will be presenting at Funding Connect in Sydney on April 22nd 2010.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the number of people who are self-employed increased to roughly 42 million at the end of 2009. Data introduced today by Elance shows its online talent pool made more than $70 million in 2009 — a 45 percent increase for US service providers alone since the beginning of last year. Businesses hiring on Elance grew at a dramatic rate — up more than 40 percent since 2008 while total earnings by people working on Elance passed $245,000,000. The trends demonstrate that online talent is an important employment segment. The labor market increasingly involves flexible work arrangements, self-employed workers and a shift to online workplaces.

The Elance Work Index, which ranks the hottest 100 skills in today’s online labor market, today revealed its December Work Index along with a year-end snapshot of top hiring trends for 2009. In contrast to recent data showing that technology job loss has risen in the last quarter to 5 percent (GovInfoSecurity.com), technology hiring continues as the strongest and fastest growing category on Elance, with IT managers posting more than 100,000 IT jobs and more than $30 million of IT services delivered on Elance in 2009. The “IT top 10” skill list include PHP, HTML, Joomla!, CSS, Wordpress, MySQL , AJAX, Adobe Flash, Java and Google Website Optimizer.

An online survey of over 800 freelance professionals found an overwhelming 79% of respondents expect their freelance business to increase in 2010 and 59% of those surveyed prefer Freelancing to Full-Time Employment. The Survey conducted by LimeExchange, the fastest growing online services marketplace, was conducted over a 45-day period beginning September 2, 2009 through October 17, 2009. Please Credit LimeExchange 2009 Freelancer Survey.

Freelancer, formerly known as GetAFreelancer, the world's top freelance jobs micro-outsourcing marketplace, today announced that its rapid growth in traffic
has thrust it into the top 1000 websites worldwide, according to Alexa.