A Large-scale Analysis of the Marketplace Characteristics in Fiverr

Presenter Information

Suman Kalyan Maity, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, IndiaFollow
Chandra Bhanu Jha, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, IndiaFollow
Avinash Kumar, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, IndiaFollow
Ayan Sengupta, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, IndiaFollow
Madhur Modi, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, IndiaFollow
Animesh Mukherjee, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, IndiaFollow

Location

Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii

Event Website

http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu

Start Date

1-4-2017

End Date

1-7-2017

Description

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 subcategories etc. and observe that while there are certain similarities with common marketplaces there are also many differences.