Nobody else wants to call it. Calling it doesn’t solve anything. But it does help the millions (now) of individual freelance contractors understand what’s going on.
The inexperienced reader will glance at the title and suspect me of hyperbole. The veteran readers, who have been following my work since the turn of the century, will appreciate that this is 20+ years of exclusive work as an eCommerce contractor talking.
Freelancing, so that we suffer no crisis of clarity, is fucked.
And to be more clear: I speak of eCommerce as the vast majority of online-only businesses; websites and channels supported by ad revenue, referral links, subscriptions, etc. From 20 years back until just a few years ago, you could set up a web domain, plug in a CMS, plaster it with ads, and make money provided your content wasn’t just useless spam. None of this applies to brick-and-mortar commerce, nor to selling physical products or paid services. THOSE markets are all doing fine, albeit with their own hangups.
But – eCommerce as in BLOGS, and the blogging bloggers who write them, are dead and buried. Not only do I feel confident that eCommerce as a stand-alone industry is in recession, but it might be in depression or even killed entirely and only come back in some other form someday – perhaps subscription services will take hold in its place.
The eCommerce recession, as I’m calling it while summoning all my remaining optimism, was the result of a perfect storm of clashing catastrophes, and indeed, the global market isn’t looking that much better. Just rest assured, Work-From-Home / remote job seekers / freelancer veterans: You’re not going crazy. It isn’t just UpWork or Fiverr or Linked-In or Indeed or whatever. It’s EVERYTHING! Nobody is getting any work, no money to spend to hire, no work to do.
After the jump: The Perfect Storm that Recession’ed eCommerce:
There’s four factors that have affected the online freelance job market in 2024. These effects have all been piling up over the past few years – in fact, we start with a very familiar, but justified, scapegoat event of our times.
- COVID killed off mostly ages 45+
- COVID’s economic wake shut down lots of small businesses
- Wars in Ukraine, Palestine, others crimp global commerce
- AI spambots are eating everything else
To take those in order: Here is why the eCommerce industry has taken an especially hard hit:
Entrepreneurs are Freelance Bread & Butter
From the 1990s all the way through till now, your typical freelance client – the people buying your services online – was getting their first few gray hairs. With the exception of the few savants who start a thriving empire fresh out of college in Silicon Valley, your typical small time entrepreneur is nearing retirement from their first career and ready to develop their “side hustle” into their main income.
This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but keep in mind that many start-up companies require some experience at the helm and a hefty lump sum of cash to get started. You tend to have that laying around past age 45+, if you’re prone to have it at all.
As I pointed out way back during the early days of COVID, the economic impact of losing even 1% of the population is significant enough to feel, and we have many more laid up from long COVID. Even for the survivors, being knocked out in a hospital on a ventilator tends to remove you from the economy for a while.
Not only did COVID kill off a lot of people, it killed off the main demographic who would be job creators right now.
Small Businesses Are Also Freelance Bread & Butter
Do I have to preach to the choir on this one? If you live in America right now, odds are that you’re only a short drive from your local dead mall, boarded-up strip mall, or closed retail chains. The NIH confirms that COVID was pretty much a big economic tidal wave that swamped any business too small to weather it.
Well, those small businesses are also us freelancers’ best clients! The attorney that needs their office listed on Google My Business, the mom-and-pop shop that needs a site set up for their fashion boutique, the plucky shuttle service with 5 vans and a position open for a social media parrot so they can drum up a contract.
Plenty of plain old brick-and-mortar businesses needed to do business online anyway, both to pull in new customers and provide more convenient services for their existing customers too. Granted, medium and large businesses hire outside contract labor too, but they’re more likely to go through intern or temp agencies than just roll the dice on Linked-In.
Global War Gums Up Commerce
This is a minor effect to be sure, but it’s still there. Between, well, the Ukraine-vs-Russia war and now a new Middle East mess (pardon my jadedness, but I sat through the ’70s watching Middle East squabbles and they never stop).
What this does to the freelance market is fragment it. Embargoes and tariffs block lines of commerce. No matter how you feel about Russia’s government, that’s still too bad for the Russian guy who used to fix your WordPress plug-ins. Since eCommerce must work in the international sphere, any barrier to cross-national trade shuts off another flow of money in one direction or another.
Whoever said “war is good for the economy” was a dolt. Peace and prosperity let you spend money too, on building wealth instead of destroying it.
Yes, the AI Robot Apocalypse is Upon Us!
AI bots put us all out of work, but not in the way you think.
If you are a freelance writer, here is why no AI bot will put you *directly* out of work: Any client willing to settle for the pages of slop that AI Chatbots churn out were people who weren’t going to pay you more than a few peanuts anyway.
Years before AI (as we know it today), spammer websites put up copy-pasted content from other sites – sometimes sent through an “article-spinner.” Cheap parasites have been trying to get something for nothing since the dawn of business; nothing different here.
What AI DID DO was make the world’s spamlords 1000x more powerful! Currently, behind every publishing medium is an editor with a full inbox maxing out storage, which they have no choice but to delete unread.
Spambots are posting fake jobs! Spambots are posting fake resumes! Spambots are clogging search! Spambots are just hosing business in general. Temporarily, people who really should know better are convinced that they can be the next Stephen King by typing prompts into ChatGPT.
What About Google?
Yes, Google search has been nuking the blog world – but it was never like this until AI bots. Google’s imperfect algorithms are just not built to handle re-digesting the progeny of its own AI engines, and the snake has finally eaten its tail. With the flood of AI garbage, Google has no choice but to nuke web content – if it wants to make money, that is, and website-based ads, if you haven’t noticed, have been flatlined for years now.
What now?
Well, now, say it with me folks:
Penguin Pete can always be wrong!
Sure, comfort yourself. I wish I was wrong. But come on, look at my batting average in the prophecy business!
Possible scenarios right now include things like “the storm will pass” and eCommerce might recover. I don’t see it though. There’s a global malaise in the economy. I haven’t felt this broke – nobody around me has felt this broke – since the late 1970s.
Or things could change in the eCommerce industry itself to adapt. I can see tele-hiring (by video chat) getting more popular. One could hire more confidently knowing somebody has a real face there and when they speak, it’s words out of their own mouth and not a chatbot sock puppet.
Oh how it has grieved me to prepare and write this blog post! Ladies and gentlemen, I have lived contently for 20 years just typing on a laptop from home and enjoying you all respond to me, my blessed little crowd!
But just in the past month, I have reached out across my network and found former clients who would love to hire me, but Google shut off the traffic to their site so they have to close. Businesses that used to employ me, but are shuttered. Just in the past week, two separate websites whom I cold-emailed said they loved my pitches, would hire me – but they’re forced to shut down now. I’m verily getting laid off before I can even apply.
There was a time when I made do without the online freelance business model, and then I adapted to that market and thrived within it. But it’s clearly time to move on to the next thing, at least as far as earning a living goes.
