An Ode To Losing Money: A Review of Booking Site Thumbtack

For those of you who have not heard of this website before; it is a highly trafficked website for searching for independent professionals (construction, IT work, entertainment). It is also a source of extreme frustration to entertainers because of the fact that it is system based on micro transactions that reward customers.

How Booking Sites Generate Their Revenue

Most websites use a fairly simple model for making revenue; you pay the site a subscription fee for posting your profile and each time the site earns you a booking you register that booking (allowing the client to review it and paying a small fee-20$).  Now almost all websites are based on this;  gigmasters, gigsalad, and even small scale third party sites (like entertainment starz) that few people use.

Now the revenue model for thumbtack is radically different; instead of a subscription fee the site makes it’s money from performers purchasing credits. Those are credits are used to submit your quotes to clients.  The amount of credits necessary for a quote is based off how many people with your specialty are in the area and how common the request is.  So a quote for a comedy magician will cost you three credits in my area while attempting a quote for a circus act is 0 credits due to the scarcity of requests and performers.  Each credit is approximately three bucks.

For the client side, the client sends out a request which goes to all the professionals on the list but only the first five professionals has their quote listed.   So the math for this is assuming a three credit quote;  each performer will spend about 9 dollars making the request.  Meaning that the site makes just shy of fifty dollars each time a request is responded to for a comedy magician.  That is assuming that the person making the inquiry hires the first person they find and do not make multiple inquiries (which about maybe a fourth to a third do).

Now this doesn’t seem bad until you realize that if you wanted to you could respond to probably about 5-10 requests a day. While on the other hand, gig master’s four month basic package is about 70$ and that you only pay per gig upon receiving payment.    While I keep an eye on thumbtack I normally do not take gigs from that site.  If I see any clients that I can contact independently usually I will reach out on my own directly to that client as I do not wish to support thumbtack.  Here’s the math as to why……

Assuming that you respond to three requests (low end) a week you will normally pay approximately 27$ a week and if you if you respond to about six request (reasonable)s it will be 54$ a week. Over the course of a month that turns into 216$ which in the space of four months will be 864$.  Without access to the websites metadata there is no way to see what the site’s ROI (return on investment) actually is.  Now between the services; I would definitely prefer spending 70$ at gigmasters and gigsalad in comparison.

 What does this mean to you?

Quality; at the end of the day when you hire someone to entertain you (be it juggling or magic or fire performance) you want quality performance.

Professionals don’t use it: Out of maybe twenty professional entertainers I know one who swears by it.  The return on investment (ROI) just doesn’t support using it.  Personally I found that the type of clients that I found on thumbtack generally speaking were looking to hire someone for an hour show at 50-100$ on average.    So what you get is a pool of young inexperienced entertainers who haven’t learned the business end of entertainment work.  This on average will lead to a  low quality show.