Success score looks like a joke

[paulkifner]

I have three main gigs, and the new success score seems like someone just put random numbers. Really, all those reasons are totally unrelated to reality. I have the most popular gig (let’s call it N1) with a success score of 8, a less popular N2 with 6, and the least popular N3 with 4, so in the end, my success score is 6. Generally, I was waiting for the new level system with excitement because I was going to be top-rated, since they lowered the required number of orders. But now, it’s going to lower my level from level 2 to level 1 🙂.

 

In the meantime, Fiverr’s email about new changes says: “Utilize this transition phase to enhance your performance and align with the updated standards. Invest time in refining your skills and metrics ensuring you’re well-prepared.” So, do I understand correctly that it’s not Fiverr’s responsibility to ensure their new metrics are relevant, but I just have to accept it no matter what?

 

Okay, let’s look at my gigs’ scores in depth: Gig N1, score = 8, negative impact in “value for money”. I have a lot of custom orders here, but I’ve no reviews with “value for money” lower than 5, and I always come to an agreement about the price, not forcing customers to buy, or something like that. Anyway, everything about this specific metric was said in this thread already: https://community.fiverr.com/forums/topic/324029-new-rating-system-is-punishing-sellers

 

Gig N2, score = 6, negative impact in “Client satisfaction”. I completely don’t understand where it’s coming from. Why does Fiverr know I have an unsatisfied client and I don’t? I have no bad reviews or something like this. Actually, I have one review with 4 stars for “value for money”, but it makes no sense at all since I’ve marked it as negative on a different gig. So they took 4 points off my score and I’m really struggling to figure out why.

 

Gig N3, score = 4 This is my favorite. I have only very satisfied clients, all reviews are 5 stars and guess what? There’s a negative impact in “Effective communication”. I’ve less than 10 orders here, and I’m 100% sure there were no communication problems with any client. This looks like a mystery to me. Even on my gig page, I see the badge “Highly Responsive. Known for exceptionally quick replies.” So what is going on here?

 

We have this explanation article https://www.fiverr.com/cp/success-score-explained right? And in the first section, we can see this small print:

 

To understand how the success score is calculated, read more here.

 

And I know why it’s so small because it explains nothing. It has the same abstract words from the previous article about best practices, and nothing about how it’s actually CALCULATED. You can see there words such as: “…along with other stats that reflect how happy buyers are”, “…different data points from reviews”, “…ability to set clear expectations”. How am I supposed to understand the new score system with this? Especially when I’ve great reviews, but in the end, I see 4 out of 10. Okay, let’s assume that I have communication problems, so why don’t I have them in other gigs? I’m still the same person.  Are you saying I turn into a werewolf when I get messages regarding another gig? Why does “Effective communication” take out 4 points, while “value for money” takes 2 points? Why are all those metrics and reasons hidden from the sellers? There are a lot of questions.

 

In the end, it looks like a random mess. In my opinion, such a success score system just CAN’T go live. Please share your opinions below. We are sellers, we are Fiverr, let’s make this marketplace better!

[visualstudios]

11 minutes ago, paulkifner said:

but I’ve no reviews with “value for money” lower than 5,

Publicly. Value for money has been on the private feedback form for over a year now. That's not having an effect on the score you see.

[provoiceworks]

Sa

2 hours ago, paulkifner said:

I have three main gigs, and the new success score seems like someone just put random numbers...

Same issue. The 2 gigs bringing down my "success" rating are my 2 most popular and highly reviewed. New system is a joke. I was TRS for 8+ years until the first roll out 8 months ago with updated system and got knocked down to lvl 2 for no reasoning at all. Now I am a lvl 1 under this roll out. None of it makes any sense and the weight they are putting on these updated review processes for client end is extreme and very broad.

[donnovan86]

3 minutes ago, provoiceworks said:

Same issue. The 2 gigs bringing down my "success" rating are my 2 most popular and highly reviewed.

So.. the leveling system takes into account lifetime reviews, lifetime cancellations, etc. It's not just the last 2 months like it was until now. That's why you see a massive difference. And the older your account is, the more reviews that can damage your success score. They do take those older reviews into account, but according to Fiverr, newer reviews are the ones that matter the most. So you can still turn things around even if you have older cancellations or bad reviews. Those don't matter as much when compared to newer stuff. 

[donnovan86]

2 hours ago, paulkifner said:

Especially when I’ve great reviews, but in the end, I see 4 out of 10

As visualstudios said, you have a lot of hidden factors that Fiverr doesn't show, and those are bringing your success score down. It seems that disputes, cancellations, stuff like that will definitely have an impact on your success score. Plus, there are still private reviews as well, even if some of the private stuff is now a part of the public reviews.

[cheftychefty]

4 hours ago, donnovan86 said:

So.. the leveling system takes into account lifetime reviews, lifetime cancellations, etc. It's not just the last 2 months like it was until now. That's why you see a massive difference. And the older your account is, the more reviews that can damage your success score. They do take those older reviews into account, but according to Fiverr, newer reviews are the ones that matter the most. So you can still turn things around even if you have older cancellations or bad reviews. Those don't matter as much when compared to newer stuff. 

Not to be rude... But that's a joke right? Let me just put it in perspective. I am a seller who typically did anywhere from 40-50 orders a month. Thats everything from logo design to web development.

Due to my 6+ years on fiverr, all of my information is being held accountable under the new system. Because of this, I went from a Level 2 to a level 0.

Fiverr's response to this is "take this next month to evaluate how you can work on bouncing back from this and recover."

How... in the hell.... Do you bounce back. The ratio just isnt there man. I went from 50 orders a month to about 15. I am swimming upstream against 6 years of history on my account... with 15 orders? How? lol. Like how does anyone combat that. It will take me at least a year to counteract the damage that this new system has done.

Like many other established artists on fiverr, my beginning was rocky. I wasn't sure I wanted to do this type of work so I treated it like a second job. For years I came and went as I built a client base. I was late on orders. Canceled orders. Wasn't the best at communicating... But with all of that said I still always maintained a 4.9-5 star rating with my clients because I never gave up on them.

Skipping ahead to today. I have matured quite a bit in the 6 years. Over the past 3 or so years this has fed my family and paid all of our bills. It's my main job and I take it very seriously.

I am now being held back due to things in the past, no matter how far i've come as a seller on this platform. I get emails all of the time from fiverr praising me for repeated customers and retention.

Now im getting emails telling me I'm just not good enough lmao. Talk about unmotivating. If they were trying to crush a huge percentage of revenue gaining sellers then they did a good job. 

What I am noticing is that the people who do logo design and graphics are the ones mostly affected by this change. People who do written work like proof reading or legal work are all getting 8 through 10 on their seller scores because the work is pretty straight forward. It's not the same and shouldnt be treated as such.

Edited February 15 by cheftychefty
Typo

[karyface1]

I've been on fiverr since 2011, more than 13,000 sales.... used to be a top rated seller with 50 daily orders and now I have 5 orders a month or less.... All my gigs are HIDDEN.... Sucess score is 4 😕 and i'm pretty sad because Fiverr was my only source of income. 
HOW DO THEY WANT US to get a better score if people can't find our gigs with a lower score?

Fiverr only cares about the buyers and their satisfaction but some buyers are mean, rude, cancel orders just because, want free stuff and if you don't give them what they want they get upset... Fiverr should do something about it too.
I'm really dissapointed

[cristinagva]

Oh, the great leveling has come. Welcome Upwork 2.0.

[eclixo]

I think this system rewards new buyers and punishes old ones because lifetime performance isn't the best criterion to judge a buyer's current performance. I hope they'll read our feedback and fix this issue.

[anniejenkinson]

I would have liked to think that me earning $300k over 3.5 years of putting in effort here (as I joined earlier but did nothing until I resigned my consulting role) could be considered a success, without needing to be fed an insulting score to tell me otherwise. They gave me TRS and Pro. Now, they insult me and give no details for how to 'improve'? It's pushing water uphill.

I've made a shift from selling $5 gigs four years ago, to selling $3,500 - $6,500 projects now. I am lost. Utterly lost. Any requests for elucidation have brought cut-and-paste responses with low relevance. 

I can see this wonderfully encouraging 'success' system having a few issues retaining high-revenue sellers.

[anniejenkinson]

3 hours ago, karyface1 said:

Fiverr only cares about the buyers and their satisfaction but some buyers are mean, rude, cancel orders just because, want free stuff and if you don't give them what they want they get upset... Fiverr should do something about it too.
I'm really dissapointed

I feel Fiverr needs its sellers to do well and tries to help us toward that, but that they are misinterpreting data left, right and center.

They need to create a proper research and statistics department drawing from client satisfaction and global data agency leaders. Clearly, they have not the first clue on how to conduct and evaluate research and then to extrapolate findings and implement solutions. It's a hellish mess of bad judgement, random ideas and mismanaged data. I do not think anyone will be passing an MBA based on Fiverr's 'success' metrics... unless it's a paper on how to get it wrong.

Edited February 15 by anniejenkinson

[smartdezigns]

13 hours ago, visualstudios said:

Value for money has been on the private feedback form for over a year now. That's not having an effect on the score you see.

Value for Money is one of the key area which is determining our success score so definitely it will have its own effect on success scores. 

Read the Key areas section in the below link:

Link: https://help.fiverr.com/hc/en-us/articles/21965360854673-Success-score

Source: Fiverr Help Center > Selling on Fiverr > Statistics & seller dashboards

[visualstudios]

2 minutes ago, smartdezigns said:

Value for Money is one of the key area which is determining our success score so definitely it will have its own effect on success scores. 

Read the Key areas section in the below link:

Link: https://help.fiverr.com/hc/en-us/articles/21965360854673-Success-score

I know how it works.

The "value for money" you see on reviews is not what's having an impact on the score - that's why you can have 5 stars in value for money in all your reviews, and see "value for money" as a negative in your success score.

What's having an impact is the "value for money" you don't see, on the private form.

[emmaki]

16 minutes ago, anniejenkinson said:

I feel Fiverr needs its sellers to do well and tries to help us toward that, but that they are misinterpreting data left, right and center.

They need to create a proper research and statistics department drawing from client satisfaction and global data agency leaders. Clearly, they have not the first clue on how to conduct and evaluate research and then to extrapolate findings and implement solutions. It's a hellish mess of bad judgement, random ideas and mismanaged data. I do not think anyone will be passing an MBA based on Fiverr's 'success' metrics... unless it's a paper on how to get it wrong.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas girl! 

I am so tired of seeing "research says" with absolutely zero citation. Research that isn't backed up by anything I can find on Google Scholar. A company that repeatedly tells sellers about its transparency WITHOUT citing their sources is NOT being transparent. This is basic research 101! 

Edited February 15 by emmaki
also i hope you don't mind but i loved your comment on the announcement thread so I passed it onto my success manager along with a curated selection of others

[paulkifner]

10 hours ago, donnovan86 said:

It seems that disputes, cancellations, stuff like that will definitely have an impact on your success score.

Yes, it definitely has an effect, and the official explanation says so. But the thing is, I do not have any disputes or cancellations on gig with score 4, but I have them on gig with score 8 and 6. Also, all the cancellations were caused by customers placing orders by mistake, and I asked support to return my canceled order rate each time, and they agreed.

 

10 hours ago, donnovan86 said:

Plus, there are still private reviews as well, even if some of the private stuff is now a part of the public reviews.

Another thing is that "seller communication level" is a public thing, and I have 5 starts on it for this gig every time, but the success score system says that I have problems with communication.


It just doesn't add up, and there are other examples of this. There's no point in trying to find a logical explanation for our score, they just did it wrong, that's all.
Honestly, I'm not surprised, it looks like typical Fiverr style. They put cancellation rate as a main metric, but they have no solution for legit cancellations, all you can do is ask support to investigate EACH case MANUALLY. They invented reply button to quote specific message only in 2023, but if your customer typing something at the same time when you do it, your reply field just disappears 😁, and there is no reply button if you chat on order page at all. There are really a lot of bad UX examples on Fiverr.

I believe that there's something fundamentally wrong with Fiverr. At first glance everything looks beautiful and eloquent, but the technical execution leaves much to be desired, to put it mildly.

[principalmike]

7 hours ago, cheftychefty said:

What I am noticing is that the people who do logo design and graphics are the ones mostly affected by this change. People who do written work like proof reading or legal work are all getting 8 through 10 on their seller scores because the work is pretty straight forward. It's not the same and shouldnt be treated as such.

I agree with all of your post, except the above. ChatGPT has had a HUGE impact on those of us offering proofreading and writing services. Sales have plummeted beyond belief.

[principalmike]

49 minutes ago, anniejenkinson said:

I've made a shift from selling $5 gigs four years ago, to selling $3,500 - $6,500 projects now. I am lost. Utterly lost. Any requests for elucidation have brought cut-and-paste responses with low relevance. 

Absolutely correct Annie. It's a mess and contacting Fiverr about it is a waste of time. Generic, cut and paste responses without fail. 

[visualstudios]

7 hours ago, cheftychefty said:

What I am noticing is that the people who do logo design and graphics are the ones mostly affected by this change. People who do written work like proof reading or legal work are all getting 8 through 10 on their seller scores because the work is pretty straight forward

This is not true, if anything I feel the opposite. I'm in video editing, which has much more moving parts than nearly any other vertical, including graphics design. I have a 10, and I feel it's easier to get and maintain that, since we can show the client what we've done, and sound impressive doing so - because we can go over a ton of details. Something like a voice over artist can just say "We recorded your script, and did it in a certain tone..." and that's it. The more steps your activity has (in the case of video we have sound design, color, editing, footage selection, titling, motion graphics, keying and compositing, etc. etc.), the more you can justify your work, and potentially look better value to the client.

Edited February 15 by visualstudios

[charlsmcfarlane]

There is not enough information. It seems that everyone has these reports of negative impacts that don’t correspond or correlate, at all, to the stats that they can see. For example, my second highest performing gig, which is Fiverr’s choice for many search terms, has 89 reviews and 100% of them are five stars. That same gig on the new success page quotes “buyer satisfaction” as a significant negative aspect of that gig. So, this clearly isn’t drawing any information from the actual ratings.

Either it’s drawing conclusions from private ratings, or it’s calculating this information based on some other objective metric. If it’s drawing this information from an objective metric, then it should highlight specific orders that we can review in order to ascertain how we can improve. I understand why the system would not highlight specific orders where a customer has given negative private feedback, as that would negate the privacy element. However, if this score is coming from some objective metric, show us what that metric is and where, specifically, we have fallen short on it.

On a related note, the guides explaining how to improve one’s score, are practically useless, as they basically explain “how to be a good seller”, giving various tips that are absolutely obvious and completely in-line with the way that any decent seller is already working. Rather than saying things like, “ensure you are communicating regularly with customers throughout the order” (obviously!), the system should be highlighting specific situations where we objectively did not do that. Highlighting these situations would not need to encroach on private reviews as the number and frequency of messages sent, and how much detail is in those messages can be objectively measured by the system. This is one example of how the system could provide actual, purposeful, actionable feedback.

[anniejenkinson]

44 minutes ago, emmaki said:

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas girl! 

I am so tired of seeing "research says" with absolutely zero citation. Research that isn't backed up by anything I can find on Google Scholar. A company that repeatedly tells sellers about its transparency WITHOUT citing their sources is NOT being transparent. This is basic research 101! 

And a company that introduces changes this sweeping and drastic, affecting so many indices at once, with the outcome of so many good sellers feeling blindsided, is doing something gravely amiss and unethical. I don't object to change, but it needs to be clear and justified, as well as extremely well thought out. This feels like when my mother used to say, 'they couldn't organize a p*** up in a brewery'.

I have never seen this kind of confusion, mayhem and devastation in all those years of working for blue chips, implementing global roll-outs and similar. I doubt any strategic consultancy will have seen this kind of upset from a significant number of (what were) top performers in a business of this magnitude.

The only big corporate blunder that's occurred to me recently was when P&O cruises sacked all their staff on a whim. The devastation here in Fiverr is because the transparency is NOT there, and we are being told to improve without any clarity of (or chance of clarity of) the issues, and there is a lot of obfuscation going on to hide Fiverr's multiple blunders. They are measuring US on communications? Try looking at yourselves, Fiverr management. This is appallingly introduced.

Its shady and suspicious. A company that has done its qualitative and quantitative analysis prior to making major changes will never have customers or providers feeling blindsided, scared, upset, tearful, and repulsed. I've spoken to sellers under each of those emotional headers.

I don't mind @emmaki if you pass my comments along! I am only glad they are getting seen!

Incidentally, after just waiting all day for anything but a cut-and-paste, pointless response from Support, a shift manager just wrote to me saying, 'I hear you are concerned about your customer satisfaction'. And gave me the usual scripted, non-bespoke hogwash, again cut and paste type, only I suspect she actually knows it by heart.

I replied, 'er, no, never mentioned that! I have already been told that my customer satisfaction is excellent! It's cancellations I asked about, i.e. the fact that they are all non-fault, instigated due to buyer error, and now, they bite me in the buttocks despite years of being told if CS revert my OCR, buyer-fault cancellations 'will have no impact!'

So I will probably wait another day, and get someone else writing, 'I hear you are worried about (insert any other irrelevant issue). What then? Concerned about yogurt? About global warming? About a plague of locusts? About losing sleep and appetite due to stress? (Pick which one is true).

Dear CS, try reading what I actually say before filling a page with stuff that doesn't remotely address the query.

It would be so nice if the ones purporting to assist us actually read our messages, wouldn't it? Whatever happened to the satisfaction surveys we used to get, asking us how Customer Support had performed on our queries? Right now, the score for this entire roll-out, on every index, would be 0. i.e., a demotion!

[emmaki]

13 minutes ago, anniejenkinson said:

And a company that introduces changes this sweeping and drastic, affecting so many indices at once, with the outcome of so many good sellers feeling blindsided, is doing something gravely amiss and unethical. I don't object to change, but it needs to be clear and justified, as well as extremely well thought out. This feels like when my mother used to say, 'they couldn't organize a p*** up in a brewery'.

I have never seen this kind of confusion, mayhem and devastation in all those years of working for blue chips, implementing global roll-outs and similar. I doubt any strategic consultancy will have seen this kind of upset from a significant number of (what were) top performers in a business of this magnitude.

The only big corporate blunder that's occurred to me recently was when P&O cruises sacked all their staff on a whim. The devastation here in Fiverr is because the transparency is NOT there, and we are being told to improve without any clarity of (or chance of clarity of) the issues, and there is a lot of obfuscation going on to hide Fiverr's multiple blunders. They are measuring US on communications? Try looking at yourselves, Fiverr management. This is appallingly introduced.

Its shady and suspicious. A company that has done its qualitative and quantitative analysis prior to making major changes will never have customers or providers feeling blindsided, scared, upset, tearful, and repulsed. I've spoken to sellers under each of those emotional headers.

I don't mind @emmaki if you pass my comments along! I am only glad they are getting seen!

Incidentally, after just waiting all day for anything but a cut-and-paste, pointless response from Support, a shift manager just wrote to me saying, 'I hear you are concerned about your customer satisfaction'. And gave me the usual scripted, non-bespoke hogwash, again cut and paste type, only I suspect she actually knows it by heart.

I replied, 'er, no, never mentioned that! I have already been told that my customer satisfaction is excellent! It's cancellations I asked about, i.e. the fact that they are all non-fault, instigated due to buyer error, and now, they bite me in the buttocks despite years of being told if CS revert my OCR, buyer-fault cancellations 'will have no impact!'

So I will probably wait another day, and get someone else writing, 'I hear you are worried about (insert any other irrelevant issue). What then? Concerned about yogurt? About global warming? About a plague of locusts? About losing sleep and appetite due to stress? (Pick which one is true).

Dear CS, try reading what I actually say before filling a page with stuff that doesn't remotely address the query.

It would be so nice if the ones purporting to assist us actually read our messages, wouldn't it? Whatever happened to the satisfaction surveys we used to get, asking us how Customer Support had performed on our queries? Right now, the score for this entire roll-out, on every index, would be 0. i.e., a demotion!

I doubt that passing on your comment will have anywhere near the impact it deserves, but we can only try. I agree with you completely that management is the issue here. 

As for CS, I have noticed in recent months that they have changed their template responses to include an initial sentence that says something like "I see/hear/whatever that you want to discuss [vague topic] before pasting in the rest of the template." 

Presumably this was done to reduce complaints that CS was sending generic templates that did not answer the question, but generic "personalized" templates on a generic template is not a solution. A better solution is hiring more support agents and providing them with better training. But like so many other businesses at the moment, Fiverr has joined the AI hype train and is using it to make so many bad decisions that really require human oversight.

That is the core issue of Fiverr and a lot of business at the moment. Humans are being carved out of jobs and replaced by AI systems that are not yet advanced enough to replace humans when it comes to complex situations. AI doesn't have the capacity for human judgement. It's amazing at a lot of other things, granted. But this is not one of them. 

Management is responsible for everything here, and I lay the blame directly at their door. But are they listening? Or are our complaints being funnelled around endless department in a game of Chinese whispers until the most sanitized version reaches management? 

I find it hard to blame the staff of Fiverr who, like us, are doing their job. They are as much victims of bad calls and business implementations as sellers are, only they are blessed by the relative steadiness of employment paychecks and regulations, whereas freelancers as contractors are not. But I don't see management coming down to the trenches to talk with the soldiers. We're all on the front line shouting at each other instead. 

All that's happening right now on the forum is that staff are reading and compiling notes and checking boxes to pass onto God knows who and ad infinitum, to be processes by another AI (probably) until, like I said, the sanitized report is delivered to management. Only the smallest of tweaks will be made to conform with whatever that report says. 

And that report, more than anything else, will be focused on investors and profit making. We are all but cogs in mammon's machine. 

NEW IDEA: Let's all fly to Tel Aviv and stage a loud and angry protest outside Fiverr HQ! Or whatever Fiverr HQ is nearest to us. A co-ordinated, global protest would be a good way to attract media headlines and bring to the fore the problems of the gig economy once again. 

[anniejenkinson]

1 minute ago, emmaki said:

NEW IDEA: Let's all fly to Tel Aviv and stage a loud and angry protest outside Fiverr HQ! Or whatever Fiverr HQ is nearest to us. A co-ordinated, global protest would be a good way to attract media headlines and bring to the fore the problems of the gig economy once again. 

You may be kidding but tbh., I did think of flying to Tel Aviv! Where should we meet? 

And the other serious point here is that we are operating 'blind' within this 'transparent system', attempting to make changes without any availability of immediate data on the outcomes. If I now take on and complete 20 low-value jobs in the one gig that's supposedly got a cancellations issue, I cannot see whether this (or any other step) has an immediate effect or not. That's because I do believe the success score thingy does not immediately update.

I like the kind of data provision that runs like Facebook ads; make one tiny tweak, and I can see the impact within minutes. 

So, how can we be driven to effect what could be major and consequence-bearing, possibly life-altering changes, with no indicators of efficacy or failure for each thing we try out on our individual profiles and gigs, before the changes we implement (if wrong choices) reach a dangerous level? For example, I could change the wrong thing and only find that out when I get demoted in a month? Meanwhile, I wasted that month because I didn't hit on what my performance truly needed?

It seems that what we need is to pile it high and sell it cheap. let's each sell 500 gubbins a month at $10 and to hell with the two 12k orders.

At least with the already poor cancellations system, if we get a cancellation, we see immediately what score the OCR has dropped to, and those of us who love stats can soon work out how many 'happy completions' we require before the next month's evaluation. Then we set about getting that extra work in and doing it. But in a 'stab in the dark' scenario? It's insanity to even try.

Here, we are hazarding blind guesses at what the problems really are, also being led astray, and in a month, in lottery fashion, we find out whether we identified the correct thing to change or not. Or maybe there is nothing to change, as I had already been told before this rolled out. That is not satisfactory or ethical to let us experiment at the risk of our incomes, homes, and dependents, when the site does not give immediacy of resultant data against which we can see the effect of the changes we implement.

I have not done any work today because I have no time because I am too busy trying to comprehend this blundering system. 

So then, I get the backlash for not delivering my usual standard next month, obviously. Fiverr, you are ripping good sellers from their usually high performance standards, risking the fast undoing of your own brand.

[catwriter]

42 minutes ago, emmaki said:

Let's all fly to Tel Aviv and stage a loud and angry protest outside Fiverr HQ!

Maybe wait until the war is over?

[anniejenkinson]

Just now, catwriter said:

Maybe wait until the war is over?

I'd honestly risk the war; Fiverr feels like a greater risk to my wellbeing just now. My partner is a bodyguard and EOD expert so he can get good body armor for us all and a 'fixer' to get us from A to B!

[emmaki]

15 minutes ago, anniejenkinson said:

I like the kind of data provision that runs like Facebook ads; make one tiny tweak, and I can see the impact within minutes. 

Before we fly to Tel Aviv, you might want to look at some of Fiverr's neighbors before going on a loud protest! 

Anyway, the analytics are awful, even the paid ones. A list of keywords where all the top keywords are HIGH HIGH HIGH tells us nothing. Even Google Ads gives broad numerical ranges (unpaid...) so you can do some analysis of the data. And in some verticals, there is no data. And for many verticals, a lot of the keyword data doesn't have LOW MEDIUM or HIGH, but "-", which I suppose means a complete absence of data. But what is it doing on a top keywords list? Did the database engineers not filter that out? I'm not a coder, but I know enough about spreadsheets and formula to know that this isn't a big ask in a SQL database. As for the other stuff, I am a low volume seller. It's cool that my gigs usually get more eyeballs than everyone else had apparently has a super-high conversion rate, but... what's the context? And if I'm making a handful of sales and others are making a lot more at cheaper prices, doesn't that mean I'm not getting a true overview of my place in the marketplace?

I rarely look at the statistics, anyway. They are corrupt and broken. But they don't harm me, unlike the new, corrupt and broken rating and level system. 

38 minutes ago, anniejenkinson said:

Here, we are hazarding blind guesses at what the problems really are, also being led astray, and in a month, in lottery fashion, we find out whether we identified the correct thing to change or not. Or maybe there is nothing to change, as I had already been told before this rolled out. That is not satisfactory or ethical to let us experiment at the risk of our incomes, homes, and dependents, when the site does not give immediacy of resultant data against which we can see the effect of the changes we implement.

They are essentially still building on top of a system that was introduced in 2010 (I think) with the launch of the platform, or at least very shortly after the launch of the platform. Nobody mistook Fiverr as a professional marketplace back then - it had sheep on the front page and gigs for men dancing in their underwear. Gamified level systems (which had zero impact other than being a fun thing) to help site growth.

This new system keeps that - and it just turns it into a mind-bogglingly confusing mess of God knows what. But now Fiverr's grown up and wants to be a professional marketplace, but is using a gamified mess that punishes the natural low volume of big ticket hires, all while grading them on the same system of low price, high volume sellers. It makes no business sense at any level and it is the opposite of professional.

Fiverr is simply trying to use automation and AI to control the marketplace. That's it. It wants to ditch the worst sellers, but keep the cheap gigs because it brings in a large portion of income (...and "conflict" problems) by dangling these hooks of levels and success and scores and whatever other shiny things. People run on hope. We all want to get to the next level. It's little more than psychological abuse when you combine gamified systems with people who are using Fvierr as a significant portion of their income. Worse, because Fiverr's own systems essentially dictate that you must put Fiverr first to succeed. 

It is such an ugly system. The last time I had huge issues with Fiverr was in Dec 2017/Jan 2018 when Fiverr turned its levels into the metric grading system that was in use until yesterday (with some small changes over the years. I had the exact same arguments then that I did now and at that time, Fiverr did not "listen" (i.e. have staff in forums talking with the community). Instead, this was all we got: https://blog.fiverr.com/post/level-systems-update-what-sellers-need-to-know

Is what we have today any better, really? No! They made everything worse and they are repeating the same mistakes as 2018. 

Anyway, here's a collection of links that I found Googling "Fiverr Case Study". Pro-Tip: use -site:fiverr.com to eliminate the 1000000000 irrelevant (and usually 'on hold', poor quality) gigs that clutter up virtually every SERP related to Fiverr. There's also a post out there somewhere by the man who redesigned the (old?) analytics page (with the earnings and world map), but I cannot find it right now. However, it is interesting if anyone wants to have a go at finding it. I forgot to save the page... 

https://www.quantummetric.com/customers/case-study/fiverr/ 

https://www.colormatics.com/case-study/fiverr/

https://www.monalabs.io/case-study-fiverr

https://orca.security/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Orca-Security-Case-Study-Fiverr.pdf

https://www.hibob.com/case-studies/how-fiverr-uses-bob/ (internal employee HR stuff)

Fiverr is run by machines, not people - and that is the choice of management, not staff.