More than 100,000 people have lost their jobs in the technology sector alone this year, and — due to either necessity or desire — at least some of them will not be returning to all full-time work. LinkedIn has had a freelancer marketplace since 2021 in an effort to corral some of that activity. Now, with other freelancer marketplaces finding things to struggle about during uncertain economic times, the Microsoft-owned company is issuing its first significant update on how it's doing.

So far, some 10 million people have created pages on LinkedIn's Services Marketplace, it says, up 48% in the last year. Service requests — not actual commercial engagements (that's not a number it is sharing) — are rising too, averaging eight per minute and up 65% overall year-over-year.

To put those numbers in perspective, LinkedIn now boasts more than 1 billion registered users-meaning that the service has captured the attention of only 1% of that vast user base. And on the buy side, matters are less clear: LinkedIn is not disclosing how many services are moving, and it's not explaining how much sellers are charging or any other patterns.

It's challenging to make apples-to-apples comparisons about the performance of LinkedIn in relation to its peers. Two major, public peers - Fiverr and Upwork - do not publicly report the number of sellers on their platforms but instead report buyers; there are about 4 million for Fiverr and 868,000 for Upwork. Estimates of freelancers on these platforms vary greatly, ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions.

LinkedIn's intent for the marketplace of services was a new business and new service for its members as it tapped into a new world of work that would emerge from the ashes of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was a rising tide that lifted other boats. Share prices of Fiverr and Upwork were soaring as a new class of knowledge workers chose to work more flexibly. Those platforms also saw interest from buyers: Businesses also went the "on-demand" way to fulfill their needs.

Fast forward to 2024, however, and freelancer marketplaces are recalibrating their business models after seeing declines in demand, increasing their "take rates" to keep revenues up as more people opt for steady employment or simply have moved away from these platforms-a trend that might well change, too, if more AI services take hold in the coming years.

LinkedIn's 10 million figure, however, and that it is spotlightting it by doing so is important. It only means that the company still finds an angle to latch on to freelancing even as it chalks modest gains so far.

The company might look at ways of building in more formal pricing down the line in the future, but as of now, it's using the freelancer platform to build engagement and to work its way toward premium subscriptions.

Perhaps most crucial, on the consumer side, LinkedIn will permit people who pay for its Premium Business tier to amplify exposure for a freelancer's profile-an entity known as a Service Page on LinkedIn. LinkedIn tells me revenue from premium subscriptions is up 51% this fiscal year, or $1.7 billion. That's still a tiny share of the bigger picture, though: the company made more than $16 billion last fiscal year.