Fiverr Delivers Visual-First Marketplace With Ease

ABOUT

Connecting the World’s Freelance Talent

Launched in 2010, Fiverr is the leading global online marketplace connecting buyers with freelancers offering a range of digital services. These services range from website design, coding, social media management, and resume writing, to complex tasks like full-production commercials. With key partnerships including interior designer and “Queer Eye” star Bobby Berk, the site is a place for sourcing high-quality work for and from creatives. That means Fiverr has to be a place where buyers are able to see quick, compelling, visually rich content.

THE CHALLENGE

1.74 Billion Images and Videos — and Counting

Most brands rely on Cloudinary’s automations to boost productivity, but few operate at Fiverr’s scale, managing billions of audio and visual assets. That means every image and video that buyers and freelancers upload to Fiverr needs to be transformed and optimized to look great and load quickly on the diverse range of laptops, mobile devices, and browsers used around the world.

Given the nature of Fiverr’s unique role in the post-pandemic, freelance-based, globalized digital economy, this massive scale shouldn’t be that surprising. “I talk with other companies who tell me they have their own brand or marketing teams that upload their specific images to the cloud,” Gil Grossman, the firm’s Engineering Team Lead, explains.

“That’s just not our use case; the point of the site is to encourage everyone to offer their expertise. Of course, we have some virus checks on what our buyers and freelancers upload, but these reviews shouldn’t create bottlenecks. We want to ensure that the images and video on our customers’ profiles help them do business efficiently. And our scale is massive — today we’re up to 10 million transformations every day.”

When users in 160 countries upload such large volumes of visual content, this translates into huge storage and bandwidth requirements for their delivery.

While still in scale-up mode in its first years, Fiverr managed all its visual content manually. This placed a massive burden on Fiverr’s development team, so they needed to find a way to automate this process.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Smooth Transformations on an Epic Scale

In 2017, the team’s internal engineering leadership realized that while it was conceivable to build its own digital asset management (DAM) workflow system, doing so would be a distraction from its main mission. To solve its user-generated content (UGC) requirements on an “epic scale,” Fiverr decided to search for a supportive technology partner.

Admittedly, Fiverr’s requirements were tricky. The ideal partner needed to offer software that could automate visual media management on a massive scale while providing a slick, frictionless customer experience. And it needed to do all that without adding prohibitive costs to their business model.

“With Cloudinary, it’s just so easy to add and change image transformations. There’s such great performance at scale and it’s so easy to use the API — it just made so much more sense.”

THE RESULTS

Empowering Fiverr to Scale New Heights

Fiverr found its ideal partner in Cloudinary, which delivered on all three requirements: epic scale visual content automation, an exceptional, frictionless UX, and a pricing model that worked. This combination of benefits empowered Fiverr to scale globally and gain market share during a time of intense competition.

Cloudinary also frees up huge amounts of time for Fiverr’s more than 20 development teams so they can focus on delivering more of what customers want.

As Grossman elaborates, “Cloudinary lets us concentrate our efforts on onboarding new features. Often when we identify a need, it turns out that Cloudinary already has a tool to automate it. That’s cool because it means we can progress forward and increase our velocity even more.”

In addition to the visual media tools, Cloudinary provides added convenience and assurance for managing all types of multimedia files:

“Fiverr is all about media, images, video, and audio on a massive scale and Cloudinary’s transformations help us to manage those so efficiently. Sellers upload lots of files to show the gigs they need help with; then potential contractors add their images and videos in response. If it’s a video or audio file, we immediately execute a transformation on uploading to crop it and adjust the size; with videos we may reduce the resolution or enhance the quality. But we also have a lot of internal engineering and R&D teams who also want to work and change images, as well,” says Grossman.

The good news, says Grossman, is that — to use the catchphrase so popular with Cloudinary customers — the software “just works.” There’s never any need to be concerned about capabilities or performance.

“At the end of the day, we sell digital assets and engineer them. So effectively our entire business is based on transformations. This is the crucial part of our business,” Grossman concludes.