Good News for Western Freelancers

If you work as a Western freelancer in the global marketplace, you know the competition from the developing world is tough. Hang in there, because the future is bright.

Following on from my last two postings that looked at internet traffic data, let's wrap up the investigation with a look at something that may not be immediately obvious.

YouTube provides an easy way of evaluating sources of traffic by country, with a world chart coloured with shades of blue. (Blogger.com offers a similar thing.)

The main source of traffic by a wide margin is the US at over 46K watch minutes, followed by Germany at over 17K, the UK is over 12K, India about a half of that at over 6K, Australia just over 4K, and then the rest at lower numbers as suggested by their shading. Notably, China is practically non-existent, with a handful of hits.

What does this have to do with freelancing? Nothing directly, but the story told by the difference between India and China is relevant. In the freelancing space, India is the main competitor to the Western freelancer. To a lesser extent, so are Russia and Eastern Europe. It is the Indian subcontinent, however, that has captured the imagination of employers seeking to "outsource" work cheaply. A Western freelancer could be forgiven for thinking that all is lost and there is no point bothering. If your Indian competitor can offer the same level of service for half your rate, why bother indeed? Well, it's not quite that simple.

The first thing to know is that the West, and Europe in particular, is on a slow but steady course of deflation, while the BRIC countries, India included, are still inflating. I give it about 5 years before India has inflated to the level of Russia and Eastern Europe, and the trend will continue after that.

And what we see in the data for China and other countries, is that the buck stops with India. There will not be another India 5 years from now. India is in a unique position as a former British colony, with good-to-excellent English language skills, close ties with the UK, and high levels of education. Apart from Pakistan and Bangladesh, no other Asian, African or South American country comes close.

As talented and capable as the freelancers from the Indian subcontinent are, the location and cultural anchoring of a Western freelancer in certain contexts provides enough of an advantage for the Westerner to continue winning contracts.

The chart above shows it well: the data is for Blender 3D tutorials. The kind of thing you may watch if you're a hobbyist or hoping to work in 3D graphics. Note that out of a population of 1 billion, India manages only half the hits of the UK. a nation of under 70 million. This is where the relevance to freelancing really comes in. The big reveal is simple: the Blender software is a cultural construct. Kind of counter-intuitive, isn't it? You would think a free, open source software title would be as generic as it gets, arousing equal levels of interest across the globe. Clearly, not so.

Such unexpected "localisations" are the reason why even at present the Western freelancer can survive and in some cases thrive against tough Indian competition. If you can work your way through the present, the ongoing trend toward equalisation between countries can only work in your favour.