Of the top 25 requested skills on the DoNanza network, three of those that climbed the rankings were specifically related to design: graphic design, website design, and logo design. JavaScript, E-commerce and content writing jobs rose, as did positions requiring Internet marketing and link building skills.

For mobile app developers, iPhone skills, remained steady at rank 21, while iPad climbed 12 spots to come in at rank 40, while Android positions climbed a whopping 20 spots, becoming the 41st most-requested skill for the quarter.

If you’re a freelancer, or you’re considering freelancing, it probably isn’t a bad idea to check out this compact report to see if it can provide some insight into where the market is heading. And if you’re a developer specializing on content management systems, you’ll get extra value from the detailed analysis the report provides on jobs in these technologies.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m skeptical of most statistics. To gauge how well the DoNanza report may actually reflect the industry’s evolution, I decided to analyze my own niche to see whether it tallies with my experience.

Analysis: The Freelance Writing Market

I’m a writer, so I honed in on writing-related jobs. Here’s the information I pulled out on this market.

The top 50 skills in-demand freelance skills included several that involved writing (I’ve also included the change in position from the previous quarter):

• position 13 Article Writing (-3)
• position 18 Copywriting (-3)
• position 24 Content Writing (2)
• position 34 Ghostwriting (1)
• position 37 Academic Writing (-1)
• position 42 Technical Writing (-5)

There were other skills that could involve or be tied to writing tasks — Research, SEO, Internet Marketing, and Advertising, for example — but as a content creator I decided to focus on the jobs that specifically required writing.

Six writing-specific skillsets in the top 50? Even if we disregard the more specialized academic and technical writing listings, writers seem to be doing pretty well, with 8 percent of the 50 most requested freelance skillsets, and 12 percent of the top 25. Overall, of course, it seems that freelance writing jobs made up a smaller proportion of the market last quarter than in the quarter before.

The category descriptions seem to overlap — article and content writing in particular, as well as ghostwriting — but there does seem to be a trend away from using copywriters and article writers in a freelancer capacity. On the other hand, content writing and ghostwriting roles represent a larger share of the total job count than they did last quarter, and my own experience reflects this: I’m doing less copywriting, and more content/article writing.

Social media may be contributing to the perceived need for content development as organizations want information to promote via these channels. While companies might commission professional web copy as a one-off, the company blog is likely to require regular updates: content, rather than copy.

The rise in ghostwriting positions may have similar causes. Ghostwriting has well and truly expanded beyond the domain of the celebrity biography; ghost writers work in blogging and business writing, and the continuing explosion of the information product market seems to be creating more opportunities for ghostwriters all the time. For example, as web personalities cement their online presences, and get busier managing and developing their personal brands and businesses, more of them are turning to ghost writers to prepare content for them, at least on a basic level.

The Verdict

In the case of my own experience as a freelance writer, the DoNanza stats seem to reflect reality, and also suggest some changes in my field that I may need to watch in the future. Check out the report here.

(Editor’s note: If you’re interested in learning more about how the Internet has shaped the freelance job market, and the opportunities presented by a 24/7 global workforce powered by technology, check out our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco in December)

How well do you feel this report reflects the developments in your industry?

Image by stock.xchng user Lotus Head.

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In my recent Long View for GigaOM Pro, I pointed out that HTML5 should be a game-changer for web apps (sub. req.). It’s no surprise that demand for HTML5 skills is growing; smart vendors seeking to gain an advantage in a highly competitive web app market will be looking to incorporate HTML5-powered features into their apps now, because the new standard allows for the development of much more complex, rich apps that will also be widely supported on mobile devices (something that can’t be said of Flash, for example).

It’s worth noting that HTML5 development is still only tiny part of the overall freelance jobs market — there were 11 times as many Flash-related projects posted than HTML5-related projects, for example — but forward-thinking web developers should certainly seek to bolster their HTML5 skills.

DoNanza’s report also contains a number of other interesting observations on the state of the online freelance jobs market, including the fact that demand for iPad development has already outstripped that of the Android, even though the former has only been on sale for few months. The report concludes with a list of the top 50 in-demand skills in freelance projects — overall, DoNanza found that PHP skills were the most sought-after. You can read the full report here.

Have you seen demand for HTML5 skills increase?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): HTML5’s a Game-Changer for Web Apps

OK, that’s a huge understatement. I dislike having to sign up for different services to access the details of the jobs they’re offering. I loathe having to wade through the reams of alerts I receive from each one. And I can’t be bothered trying to remember which ones require me to buy a subscription in order to pitch for jobs, and which ones don’t, as well as all the other little nuances of each service.

I can safely say that so far, my job search subscriptions have not paid off. For me, the tedium and frustration of tracking all these individual subscriptions has far, far outweighed any value I’ve obtained from them. Last week I wound up just trying to search direct through Google in a desperate attempt to find the kind of project I wanted at a decent rate. Yes, I was that fed up. So when I heard about DoNanza, a service that’s touted as “redefining the search for online projects,” I hoped it might actually live up to its own PR.

What’s the big deal about DoNanza? It’s a job search engine that pulls results from freelance and remote working job sites across the web. No longer do we mere mortals have to visit multiple sites to search their listings. DoNanza appears to be a one-stop shop for job search.

So far, so good. I took it for a spin and found that an immediate benefit of the service was that it introduced me to freelance sites I’d never heard of, let alone visited — many of them in countries other than my own. So automatically it puts you in touch with a much wider pool of projects and employers.

Then I noticed a very cool filter pane on the left of the search results page. This pane uses sliders to allow you to filter the search results by price, project type, time left and date posted. You can also use it to include or exclude results from specific sites. I find this particularly nice because it lets me refine my search right on the results page — I don’t need to make extra clicks to access the “refine search” options. Hooray! Of course, DoNanza also offers all the usual features you’d expect: related search prompts, RSS and Twitter tracking, the ability to email results to friends, and so on. And — wait for it — you don’t need a(nother) subscription!

Keep in mind that DoNanza is not a job board. It doesn’t offer its own jobs (yet — will this change in time?); it acts purely as a search engine for other job sites. So when you click on a result, you go direct to the site on which it’s listed. As such, the service is very highly focused. It does one thing — offer web-wide job search — and I think it does it well.

It’s interesting, not to mention timely, that DoNanza has launched now, when many of us are feeling the pinch of financial uncertainty and looking for projects. It makes very short work of the search process itself, and takes the immense hassle out of finding freelance job sites that have the kinds of projects you want at the right rate. As I used the site, I began to wonder why no one had launched an equivalent service already — and those kinds of thoughts are usually a sign that a new idea is going to be a big success.

Do you use online job sites to secure freelance work? If so, what are some of the good ones you’ve come across? Do you think DoNanza might help your current job search process?

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