Looks like the online market for freelancing services is continuing to grow, if the number of local startups working in the space is anything to go by.

The latest to join the fray is ProTask.

As co-founder Richard Garnett explains:

We are a new freelancing website. Our point of difference over other freelancing websites ‘ServiceSeeking’ ‘Ozlance’ etc is that we do not charge any fees at all to either list a task or to bid on a task posted.

Personally, I wouldn’t be betting the farm on price as a long-term point of differentiation in this space, but in what appears to be a growing market it makes sense to lower the barrier to participation as much as possible to build market share. What’s more, the team appear to have some good commercial/development experience, so there’s potential to ID other more sustainable points of differentiation, if they can get the critical mass needed to make markets work.

Of course in addition to these services, which also compete with global sites like eLance and oDesk, there are other local Aussie sites like WhoCanDo, which focuses on tradespeople and, of course, Crowd-sourcing sites like DesignBay and 99 Designs, which are also a form of freelancing.

One thing to note is that that some of these startups have focused on the global market and some are going for a more local approach. It should be interesting to see what the winning strategy is.