I was curious about the market dynamics on elance, so I gathered some data from elance skill trends pages:
After some data matching and basic categorization, I put together the visualization above, attempting to show which skills are the most valuable on elance. I would have liked to analyze the differences between hourly rate of freelancers and jobs, but hourly rates are only available for top skills, so maybe another time.
I tried to use a short interactive format (see The Case for the 5-Second Interactive) that I find good a conveying information.
Update: After using elance myself, I would say that this data reflects only part of the reality:
- A lot of jobs are not done on a hourly basis
- hourly rates listed by freelancers can be different from the ones used when hired
- A lot of profiles our outdated
- despite those numbers, it is possible to be successful on elance (some earn 100k a year)
Done with d3.js