Elance Online Work Report

Elance issued its monthly report regarding the online work market trends for the web development and web design niche. Recognized as the biggest membership fee job portal, Elance provides detailed statistics for areas like logo design, web programming, digital graphics, online marketing, SEO, system administration, copywriting, identity branding legal advice and more.

This month's report was based on more than 100,000 jobs posted on Elance in the last few months, coming from 60,000 different hiring companies and more than 97,000 registered members answering those jobs.

During July 2009, Elance reported more than 26,000 new jobs, achieving more than 270,000 new jobs and 100 million dollars in earnings in the last 12 months.

The report ranks 100 job categories according to the number of jobs and earning possibilities. After four months at number one, it seems that PHP finally fell to the former leader, Graphic Design Skills, which retook the number one slot. Adobe Flash skills, formerly ranked at number 3, exchanged places with MySQL, the top five being completed with HTML skills.

The biggest riser in the top ten was Internet Marketing, ranked at number seven, after being ranked 14th last month. Web Content took the biggest dive out of the top ten, falling from the sixth to the twelfth position.

This month's most impressive growth was recorded in the Word Processing category, which rose 38 positions to the 32nd slot. Meanwhile, Twitter skills fell 25 positions to 71st, behind Facebook (63rd) and other Social Networking Skills (45th). All social networking categories recorded losses this month.

In demand trends were customer optimization and customer support related skills, which all recorded growth in the number of jobs posted lately (Sales, SEO, Lead Generation, Internet Marketing and Advertising). In the top ten, programming skills still dominated, with the presence of PHP (2nd), MySQL (3rd), HTML (5th), Joomla (8th) and CSS (9th).

The entire report, containing the Elance Top 100 can be found here.