A Large-scale Analysis of the Marketplace Characteristics in Fiverr

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of Fiverr, a supply-driven marketplace, examining seller and buyer behaviors, community structures, and marketplace dynamics, highlighting both similarities and differences with demand-driven platforms.

Contribution

It offers the first large-scale characterization of Fiverr's marketplace, revealing unique seller behaviors, community formations, and competitive patterns.

Findings

Sellers tend to be more engaging and persuasive in interactions.

Existence of small, tightly-knit seller communities supporting each other.

Differences in sales, churn, and competitiveness compared to demand-driven marketplaces.

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.