Keep in mind that many of the workers at V.Worker (and Rent-a-Coder <same company>) are from places other than the US and Europe. For some of these folks the chance to land a project to work on for say $300 may be equivalent to a months pay!

These sites really do match up an international community with buyers looking to get projects done by workers. The sites provide a payment escrow service so that there is some degree of worker protection that the money will be there when they finish and deliver the work according to the agreed upon plan.

Several observations I have made about these sites:

1 - They extract a pretty good percentage out of the amount the buyer pays for their projects. If I recall correctly I believe it ranges from something like 6.5% to above 10%.

2 - If you look at the project listings you can see that many, many, many of the buyers are clearly looking to get things done cheap by the standards of what expert consultants in the US may be able to garner. Not all are this way though.

3 - Many of the projects are almost laughable in what somebody thinks they want. You can find things as mundane as somebody looking for a worker to "rewrite" article descriptions for a dating web site into a new "non plagarized" version that they can then use on their own dating site.

4 - There are very many technical projects looking for bids on work requests that are basically devoid of any reasonable specification.

These factors and others have kept me from even considering bidding on any projects. Another interesting thing is that I probably would _never_ find myself becoming a buyer and posting a project because all the things I would post are things I can do myself.

Michael Karas