From Good to Worse

Today’s Creative Moonlighter newsletter basically says:

a) We’re raising our membership fee!

b) We’re dropping the most important strategic benefit membership has to offer!

Note to the CM staff: publishing two pieces of really bad news at once is generally frowned on by your customers.

I’ve written before about Creative Moonlighter, and my efforts to land freelance writing work there. Generally — despite the fact that too many employers there have “champagne tastes and a budget for beer” — the service has been a good one.

Paid membership has, until today, offered two meaningful perks:

1) Your bids are submitted immediately. With the free membership, the system holds your bid for seventy-two hours before submitting it. This effectively renders your bid — and the free membership option — useless, since every single Creative Moonlighter employer I worked for made his decision to hire me within twenty-four hours of posting the job.

2) Through the Follow-Up Tool, you can make direct contact with the employer. Without paid membership, there’s no way a pro can talk directly with the folks placing the bid. Once you pay the membership fee, however, the Follow-Up Tool makes it possible to send an email message directly to the decision maker. That’s proved critical for me: before I learned to use the follow-up tool, I never landed a single gig. Once I learned to make good use of it, I started landing work on a regular basis.

Today, Creative Moonlighter announced they’re raising membership fees … and doing away with the Follow-Up Tool.

I hoped this announcement meant that they had implemented a more powerful, more flexible method for pros and employers to come together. (In fact, about eight months ago, I sent them a long list of suggestions on how to do exactly that.)

Unfortunately, eMoonlighter is doing just the opposite. Instead of making it easier for pros to contact employers, they’re replacing the Follow Up Tool with a proprietary “private discussion database” hosted at the eMoonlighter web site. Once it’s in place, pros won’t be able to initiate contact with employers anymore.

That’s an odd move, given that the pros — not the employers — are eMoonlighter’s real customers. Employers don’t pay eMoonlighter a dime — the pros do, through membership fees and commissions. A move like this one hints that the folks at eMoonlighter have fogotten who their customers really are.

The change is great for eMoonlighter, since it forces everyone to use their database and forces traffic to the eMoonlighter site. This month’s newsletter even does a pretty good job (despite the stiff, carefully sterile corporate langauge) at spinning the change as a benefit for employers: “Employers will no longer receive multiple emails from professionals.”

Tellingly, however, the announcement doesn’t cite a single benefit for pros, with good reason: there isn’t one.

Over the past year, I’ve personally recommended Creative Moonlighter to dozens of employers and pros as a fast, fair marketplace where good talent can be found at good prices.

As of today, though, I can’t recommend Creative Moonlighter — or any of the other eMoonlighter services — to anyone. In the rush to tighten their grip and control communication between the people they bring together, they’ve taken the single most important perk of membership … and strangled it to death.

An update to this article is also available.