Freelancer.com has released data revealing the most popular jobs of 2023, based on over one million projects posted on the platform. The data indicates a significant shift towards video creation jobs, with brands increasingly incorporating video into their marketing strategies.

Video creation jobs, including Videography (up 53.7%), Video Production (up 34.6%), YouTube Video Editing (up 22.1%) and TikTok (up 15.7%), were among the fastest-growing skills on the platform. The demand for these skills is driven by brands' growing focus on video content in their marketing strategies.

Alongside video creation, skills related to photo editing and photography also saw significant growth. Adobe Lightroom projects saw the highest percentage growth across the year, while Photography as a skill grew by 3,625 total jobs. Freelancers in the United States are charging up to $300/hour for Photography skills, $200/hour for Videography and Video Editing, and $160/hour to create TikTok content.

Graphic Design was the most popular job on the platform, with over 250,000 jobs posted, followed by Photoshop (164,970) and PHP (164,359), a programming language used for website design. Freelancer.com's data also revealed that branding and marketing-related jobs were among the highest paid on the platform, with branding fetching an average of $112 AUD per hour and internet marketing jobs paying $2,649 AUD per project.

However, the data also revealed a decrease in demand for blog writing, which ranked as the 13th in the top falling jobs on Freelancer.com, decreasing by 66% from 4,872 to 1,648 jobs posted in 2023.

“Advances in generative AI are changing the way businesses are communicating and marketing themselves. A boom in video and photography services is a clear indication that there’s a shift towards visual, highly-produced content as opposed to reliance on legacy forms of internet marketing, such as a reliance on blog posts and articles to generate traffic. We expect this trend to continue and are already seeing signs of video and marketing categories continuing to increase in 2024,” said Matt Barrie, Chief Executive at Freelancer.com.

Barrie also highlighted the impact of AI on the freelancing world: “AI can’t replace creativity, yet. Although this may emerge with model scale. We said this in the middle of the year when we saw creative writing jobs increase in Q2 2023 and the sentiment remains the same in 2024. What we are seeing is that our freelancers are moving up the stack. They’re evolving from just blog writers to editors. Moving from just illustrators to directors. Ultimately, AI is elevating our talent and improving efficiency and productivity in the process.”