A Large-scale Analysis of the Marketplace Characteristics in Fiverr

Abstract: Crowdsourcing platforms have become quite popular due to the increasing demand of human computation-based tasks. Though the crowdsourcing systems are primarily demand-driven like MTurk, supply-driven marketplaces are becoming increasingly popular. Fiverr is a fast growing supply-driven marketplace where the sellers post micro-tasks (gigs) and users purchase them for prices as low as $5. In this paper, we study the Fiverr platform as a unique marketplace and characterize the sellers, buyers and the interactions among them. We find that sellers are more appeasing in their interactions and try to woo their buyers into buying their gigs. There are many small tightly-knit communities existing in the seller-seller network who support each other. We also study Fiverr as a seller-driven marketplace in terms of sales, churn rates, competitiveness among various sub-categories etc. and observe that while there are certain similarities with common marketplaces there are also many differences.