PeoplePerHour.com membership grows 24% in a week as BBC TV report describing the site as an eBay for business’ results in huge surge of interest.
Thousands of hard-hit small businesses have flocked to PeoplePerHour.com after the BBC 6 O’Clock News described the site as like eBay, but for business’. (View the report here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgX0cFHnvfw&feature=channel_page)
Since the piece aired last Wednesday, PeoplePerHour.com has seen more than 5,000 new profiles created on the site and over 100,000 new visitors. In particular, small businesses are using the website to source remote ad hoc workers for a wide range of jobs • from copywriting to bookkeeping, graphic design to web marketing.
The recession has been a key factor in the rapid growth of the UK-based website, which launched in early 2008. Small businesses have been especially hard-hit. Those that have managed to continue trading have been forced to implement dramatic cost cutting initiatives and, in many cases, redundancies. PeoplePerHour.com enables these companies to source reliable, remote and highly-skilled workers for jobs that would previously have been undertaken by costly in-house staff or agency workers.
Now small businesses can post a job on PeoplePerHour.com and any of the 26,000+ registered providers on the site with relevant experience and expertise will be invited to bid for the work.
The site has proved a saviour to thousands of Britons who have been affected by the recession and have started selling services through PeoplePerHour.com for a wide range of reasons. These include recent graduates who can’t find work, retirees needing to boost depleted pensions, people who have been made redundant and individuals supplementing their primary source of income.
“The recession has certainly helped fuel our growth • both in terms of creating supply of freelance workers and demand for their services,” says PeoplePerHour.com founder and CEO Xenios Thrasyvoulou. “However, the trend for businesses to use remote freelancers has been growing for several years now and is expected to continue after economic recovery. The prevalence of broadband has made finding skilled individuals efficient and reliable.”
For further information, photos, interviews and case studies, please contact:
Sami McCabe
t: +44 (0) 20 3393 8277
m: +44 (0) 7789 777 440
e: sami@ubiquitycomms.com
PeoplePerHour.com Background Information
PeoplePerHour.com was founded in 2007 by two Cambridge University graduates: Xenios Thrasyvoulou and Simos Kitiris.
The company is funded by its founders and a group of prominent angel investors who are active in the internet space.
Typical PeoplePerHour.com buyers run a small businesses (usually less than 20 people) including boutique financial firms, internet companies, property and PR agencies amongst many others.
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