The Case Against Fiverr: Voice Over's Surplus Value

Fiverr is a company that doesn’t have the strongest track record when it comes to ads.

They’ve come under fire multiple times before for running campaigns such as this one which encouraged an unhealthy, crushing relationship with your work, and this one, which many saw as the tacit encouragement of affluent white ideas guys to both profit off of and exploit the labor of working class women of color.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, Fiverr positions themselves as, in their own words, “the world’s largest marketplace for digital services”. This description is a bit thin; Fiverr is primarily a website where freelancers offer their services to as massive an audience as possible, usually starting at around $5 per “gig”, as the website’s name would suggest. A gig is essentially any freelance job, whether that be to create a logo, develop a website, or produce a piece of music.

And now it seems that Fiverr have set their sights on taking the voice over community down a peg with Need A Voice Over? Obviously Fiverr.

In this commercial, a very chipper spokesperson takes us on a showroom tour of one of the more soulless million-dollar open offices I’ve seen, where we get to mock pretentious voice actors in purple turtlenecks (they prefer the term “vocal composer”) who have the audacity to charge “triple for the same gig” that you could just get through Fiverr, instead. We’ll dig more into that last point later.

Needless to say, this didn’t go over well with the voice over community on Twitter. Even though the video is around six months old at this point, it only recently started gaining traction, racking up hundreds of dislikes and dozens of angry comments in the week since its discovery. It’s one more colossal corporate misstep for the pile, and another example of how little Fiverr thinks of the people that allow their gig economy business model to function at all. The entire ad, ironically enough, was produced with the same SAG-AFTRA talent that Fiverr is telling its own customers to revolt against.

So, now it’s time for the big question: why even bother working for Fiverr?

The short answer is that you shouldn’t. The longer answer needs us to explain how voice over freelancing on Fiverr got to the state that it’s in, and how even the most successful voice over artists on the website aren’t being paid a fraction of what they’re worth.

The Race to the Bottom, Brought to You by the Gig Economy

Let me preface this entire section by stating that I have zero personal gripes with anyone who uses Fiverr to make a living. We all have to eat, pay rent, and survive, and I’m not going to judge anyone who does what they need to do to get by. We’ll be using some examples containing real people and real prices in order to demonstrate the current problems with voice over on Fiverr, and I’ll be blurring out as much identifying personal information as I can. I ask that you don’t go looking for or otherwise brigade these individuals, because they haven’t done anything wrong. They’re just one very minor part of a system that exploits the work that they do.

With that out of the way, let’s do a case study.

Again, I’ve taken the liberty of censoring as much information as possible in the interests of privacy. This individual does good work — excellent work, even — but we’re only interested in the few things that I’ve left in focus. Take a minute to really study what’s left behind in that picture, and then we can break it down piece by piece.

As you can see, this individual is considered a “Top-Rated Seller”, netting tens of thousands of glowing reviews since they began working on Fiverr. They’re a voice over artist, and currently have roughly a dozen orders queued up at any given time. This person is clearly driving a lot of interest towards their talents.

But there’s one problem. One big, parakeet-green-colored problem.

For just five dollars (USD), you can get yourself one hundred words of spoken material. The price increases linearly as you go up, too; $10 gets you two hundred words, $15 gets you three hundred, and so on.

From the outset, this is a colossal undersell. This individual is selling their voice over services for just $0.05 per word, which is a rate that’s practically unheard of outside of the most beginner of independent creations; a quick glance at the Voice Acting Club’s Indie Rate Guide shows us that five cents per word is the absolute minimum for a paid indie project, with the suggested average being quadruple that at $0.20 per word.

Don’t forget that Fiverr also charges a 20% commission fee (yes, a whole fifth of the final price!) on every purchase made, and that said commission fee comes out of the pocket of the person who sells the service. That puts us down to just $0.04 per word, which is below the suggested minimum as laid out by the Indie Rate Guide.

Fiverr does, however, include an Order Details tab on every payment page, which tends to sell “bonuses” such as added background music or heavy editing to be completed by the voice over artist at an additional charge. Many voice over artists that use Fiverr include distribution rights in this Order Details tab; perhaps this five dollar rate listed above only applies to private creators, and doesn’t allow for any form of redistribution without a significant additional charge. That would make this pricing scheme much more fair to the voice over artist, wouldn’t it? Let’s take a look:

The rough draft of this blog post simply contains the line “commercial rights for just $15 is completely bonkers”, followed by a few redacted cusses and no further given explanation. Truth be told, I’m hard-pressed even now to expand on that gut reaction. For a single fifteen dollar release payment, any customer is free to redistribute and reuse this individual’s voice over, with any and all additional generated proceeds going directly into the pocket of said customer.

Sure, if you’re the Average Joe on the internet, making your project on a budget of zero dollars and a dream, that’s really all you can afford. Unfortunately, this is where one of the major problems of Fiverr comes into play.

Fiverr is open to everyone. That includes major companies, big-name social media influencers, and advertising agencies.

Why, then, would you allow others to sell one hundred words of your voice for a grand total of twenty dollars? Your labor is worth much, much more than that, and there’s an incredible amount of surplus value that you’re allowing yourself to have stolen from you.

The Labor Theory of Value

The Labor Theory of Value is incredibly simple as a base concept, and it’s one which modern economics has based itself off of over the past hundred years. In the most absolute basic terms, the theory essentially states that society is willing to pay for a job whatever society deems that job to be worth. For example, if society deems a job to be not worth much, then that job tends to pay out minimum wage.

Regardless of how you feel about what a job is truly worth (I personally abhor the term “low-skill jobs” and the stigma placed upon those who work in such fields), these are the current rules that the system has set out. These economic rules are entirely subject to change — the last holdouts of feudalism only ended about two centuries ago, after all — but they’re what society at large is working with right now.

Things get much more complicated when we introduce the idea of surplus value. Surplus value refers to the value of the goods or services that you produce as a worker that is ultimately not reflected in your wages. You may do a job that generates a significant amount of value for a company you work for, and see only a small fraction of it be paid out to your wages; instead, the majority of that value is paid out to your boss or manager.

In order to understand the fundamental problems presented by Fiverr, we’ll need to refer back to our earlier example pages, and see just how much surplus value we stand to lose.

Let’s say that I’m looking to hire someone to provide a voice for my commercial. I’m the head of a major video game studio’s advertising department, and we’ve got millions to spend on getting this project from our warehouses and into the hands of the public. But, hey. Money is money, right? The less we can spend on this, the more we’ll have left over for the office release day party. That means that we’re gonna use Fiverr to find our voice.

So, I go on Fiverr and scout out a voice over artist that I like. I read through their page, check the prices, proofread our script, and move to checkout. For $10, I’m able to ensure that they read our entire two hundred word script; for an extra $50, I can secure full broadcast rights and air this commercial wherever I want once it’s done. Grand total? Sixty bucks.

I wake up the next day and see the voice over artist’s submission in my inbox. My team and I listen to it for quality assurance purposes and then send it off to production to get it all finalized.

That Sunday, the Super Bowl airs on TV. Our ad plays right before halftime.

People love it! They think our game is going to be phenomenal. They love the way it looks, the way it plays, and they especially love the voice over artist that our company got to voice the commercial. Our new customers rush out in droves, buying up 25,000 copies of the game (all priced at $59.99) within the first hour after our commercial launches. The rest of the people who liked our ad decide that their local Gamestop can wait until after the Big Game is over.

In the span of an hour, I’ve made one and a half million dollars. And for all of your work, all of your effort, the massive contribution that you made in helping me sell that game to all of those people, how much are you getting in return?

Forty eight bucks, after Fiverr takes their cut. And not a single cent more.

The 104,166% Off Discount

Is that fair? Well, no. The Global Voice Acting Academy (GVAA) doesn’t seem to think so. An ad of that length airing on national television with full broadcast rights being given to the company should be worth at least $3,200. And even then, they can only air it for a year. You, however, sold them the rights in perpetuity, meaning that the company can air that ad as many times as they want, forever. They can alter it, they can make new ads with the same voice clip that you sent them, and you can make them another few million dollars off the back of your labor.

Of course, that price estimate assumes that we’re just airing it on regular television. This is the Super Bowl, right? In 2020, the average cost to air a 30-second commercial during the game was about $5.6 million. The GVAA estimates the maximum cost of a single mnemonic (the little taglines that get read aloud at the end of a commercial, like AOL’s “You’ve Got Mail!”) to be around $50,000; odds are that you could pretty safely expect to earn at least that much by voicing an entire Super Bowl commercial from start to finish.

But you didn’t. Instead, you used Fiverr, and gave that company what was effectively a 104,166% discount.

Maybe you’re savvy. Maybe you anticipated this, and asked a bunch of questions well in advance, and wrote up a glorious contract. Your contract ensures that you’ll be paid well, that your voice won’t be misused in any way, and that none of your labor is going to be exploited for surplus value. You hand over the contract to the approaching party, and wait for a reply.

It never comes, and the company gets their work done by somebody else who charges a little less and doesn’t ask so many questions. Their work is good. Just as good as yours. But this entire time, you’ve been a part of this website — this system — that encourages everyone to race to the bottom. If you’re not doing that, then you’re out.

You can keep your industry standards and not make a single sale, or you can compromise on your ideals along with everyone else and hope to get a few breadcrumbs for your work. Your choice.

The Problem is Endemic

I’ve heard it said multiple times that people unfairly rag on Fiverr in proportion to other websites, such as Voices123 or Voices.com. These pay-to-play (P2P) websites require you to pay an entry fee before you can begin accepting job offers, with some locking the auditioning process itself behind a paywall. I don’t think Fiverr gets an unfair amount of criticism; however, I do believe that Fiverr isn’t the only problem, either.

P2P websites are, from their inception, inherently classist. Not everyone can afford to pay the entry fee on top of the costs of home studio treatment and the price of equipment, and there are a lot of people being locked out of major gigs because they are either unwilling or unable to front the cash to get into the secret club.

Nearly every website or process comes with its own suite of problems, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t address any of them. Address the problems with Fiverr. Address the problems with P2P sites. Hell, address the problems with moving to Los Angeles. Just because everything has unique issues doesn’t mean that we give up and resign ourselves to things just being “the way they are”. It means we organize and we fix them.

There have been rumblings about Fiverr “ruining the industry”, with some studios allegedly putting voice over artists on a permanent blacklist if they conduct work through Fiverr. I can’t say much about the impact Fiverr has on the industry; I’m an outsider to the professional world of VO right now, and there’s only so much I can learn by studying it from a distance. I honestly don’t know. That’s why we listen to the professionals.

A lot of people who have been working in voice over for a long time will usually give newcomers like us a little insight to try and help us along. Figuring out your rates, knowing when to craft a demo reel, getting coaching, the works. They offer advice because they want to help. They don’t want people to make the same mistakes that they did when they were first starting out.

So when you see a professional talking about a website like Fiverr, or Voices123, or whatever else is popular at the time, listen to what they have to say. These are the people that are in the industry that we want to work in, and they’ve got their finger on the pulse of the voice over world. Odds are that they know what they’re talking about, especially if they’ve managed to reach a consensus with a few of their peers. You don’t have to take it all as gospel, but take it in and use it to influence whatever decision you choose to make.

Are Fiverr and the gig economy as a whole hurting the voice over industry? Maybe. If you want to try and become successful there, you’ll have to resign yourself to a career of making a pittance and driving public perception of your worth and everyone else’s into the ground. For a lot of people, that’s enough to pass judgment. For some, they’ll stick to their guns and race to the bottom with everyone else.

Either way, you’re worth a lot more than five bucks.