Hi Reader!
We seem to live in a world of extremes right now. Every idea, political ideal, and opinion is polarized. If someone disagrees with you, they don't try to find middle ground or even talk about it. They cancel you. Someone doesn't like some aspect of history? Erase it.
I don't know about you, but I find it exhausting.
I see this happening in our marketplace too. We have two groups of people out there shouting as loud as they can. Group one is saying, "AI is going to take all of our jobs! Embrace it or perish." Group two is more head-in-the-sand: "This too shall pass. Wait it out. It'll reverse."
I don't think either group is anywhere near right. The reality is somewhere in the middle.
I had a coaching client a few weeks ago come straight out and ask me, "Treasa, is freelancing dying? Do I even have a chance, or should I chuck it in and find something else to do?"
My response was, "Some of it is dying, yes. But I think there'll be massive growth in other areas."
I suspect you already knew that, because you've been watching it happen the same way I have.
The do-the-work version of freelancing built on competing rates, volume, speed, and deliverables is collapsing. There will always be companies who want deliverables, the question is how much do they value them?
There's a second version that focuses on strategy, understanding, and application of knowledge. It depends on solving problems and delivering results instead of providing a deliverable. That version is growing.
The market is splitting in two.
The reason I decided to write this newsletter though, is that I found something that surprised me. Your success right now has surprisingly little to do with how good you are at the work.
We have to look at the good and the bad so we can decide where to go from here.
What I see happening
I'm a compulsive researcher. If I want to know about something, I want to know as much as possible. So I decided to see if I could validate my perception of what's happening.
AI has been around long enough now for statistical trends to be clearly visible, and here's what I found. (Note: I'm going to use some language here I normally wouldn't use (jobs, hire, etc.) because that's what was used in the studies. I'm still firmly in the you're a business not an employee-substitute territory.)
AI ate the bottom of the market. No surprise there, so I won't sugarcoat this one. Researchers analyzed 1.7 million job posts on a major freelance platform and found that within eight months of ChatGPT's launch, writing job posts fell roughly 30 percent relative to those tasks AI can't do.
That was the biggest drop of any category they measured.
Ouch, right?
But the same study found that the writing jobs that survived were more complex and paid more. This one is a loss/win.
Layoffs flooded the market. Marketing departments have been gutted for three years running. The people who held those jobs still have mortgages, so a lot of them needed work fast and the job market is atrocious. They didn't choose freelancing, they had it thrust on them. That means there are more people vying for the same or less work. I don't want to generalize, but I see a lot of them approaching freelancing from that employee mindset. Among other things, they are charging employee rates without considering business expenses (taxes, overhead and such), which hurts overall market prices.
There's hope here too, though. Those same companies cut their expenses by laying people off, but they didn't cut the need for marketing. The senior-level work still needs done, and now there's nobody down the hall to do it.
Upwork's research found that 77 percent of business leaders say AI is actually increasing their need for fractional, specialized talent. That indicates a shift in the market we can benefit from.
The word "freelancer" doesn't mean what it used to. Say "freelancer" to a client in 2026 and the picture in their head is likely a gig platform where they can hire the cheapest acceptable option.
Last year I was talking to one of my content strategy clients and I asked if they'd be hiring freelancers for the work that needed done. (I always ask so I can refer people!) He said, "We don't really work with freelancers. The result is usually so low quality and generic that the editing process is a total rewrite."
They equated "freelancers" with platforms like Upwork and Fiverr, not professionals who operate at the expert level. I've asked about that in quite a few conversations with clients since then, and the conversations have all been similar.
It's a relatively new trend I'm seeing. Maybe it's because I've never called myself a freelancer (I'm a writer, or strategist, or consultant). Maybe it's the type of clients I work with. It's ultimately a positioning problem, which means you can solve it. A demand problem would be so much worse.
People are leaving. I'm seeing a lot of posts lately in Facebook groups and on LinkedIn about people transitioning out of marketing entirely. Some of those choices are completely rational. If your whole income came from the commodity end of the market, it's almost impossible to bring in enough work to live on.
There's an upward trend as well
On to the good stuff.
MBO Partners has been tracking the independent workforce for 15 years, and their 2025 report found a record 5.6 million American independents earning more than $100,000 a year. That's up 19 percent in one year, and it has nearly doubled since 2020. To add some additional context: the total independent workforce barely moved, from 72.7 million to 72.9 million.
The market overall isn't booming, but pieces of the pie are definitely changing sizes.
Reports from the fractional world tell the same story. The State of Fractional Industry Report counted 120,000 fractional professionals in 2024, double the number from two years earlier, and nearly three-quarters of them have 15 or more years of experience.
Companies are paying premium rates for knowledge, critical thinking, strategic ability and the ability to apply those things.
Everywhere I looked in the data, the same pattern kept showing up:
- Yes there are fewer clients
- But they're spending more money
- On specialized and senior people.
Every stat that looks like death for freelancing and independent work from one end of the market looks like growth from the other.
This isn't the end
I don't think this is the end of what we do. I do think it's the end of what we've been calling it (if we want to be in that bigger pie slice), and the end of one particular way of doing it.
Being good at what you do isn't enough anymore. If you remember one piece of evidence from this newsletter, make it this one. Researchers at Washington University studied what happened to Upwork freelancers after ChatGPT launched, and the group that took the biggest hit wasn't the beginners. It was the top performers. The people with the strongest track records (best at execution) and the highest rates lost the most ground. I've seen that reflected in social conversations too.
If excellence were protection, the best people would have been the safest. They weren't.
The game has changed, my friend. Which means the answer can't be "do what you've been doing, harder." We have to adapt.
What adapting looks like
1. The gap between freelancers and professionals is becoming a canyon.
Decide which side of that gap you're on, and then act like it everywhere a client might encounter you, starting with what you call yourself.
I never introduced myself as a freelancer because I always saw what I do as a business. I never wanted to compete on availability and price. I set my availability and my rates based on business needs.
The market is going to sort you into one of those buckets (freelancer or professional/business) whether you participate or not, so you might as well have a say in it.
2. There are specialists, and then there are specialists.
For years, everybody preached niching down. Have you noticed how quiet those people have gotten? The advice is still right, but the axis moved. The old niche was a narrower service category. "I write blog posts for B2B SaaS companies."
So does AI.
The new niche is depth. Industry context, pattern recognition, and the accumulated knowledge that lets you tell a client what's working and why. Nobody can prompt their way to that, because it exists in your lived experience.
3. Whatever your deliverable is, you sell results now.
Execution (writing, planning, design) got cheap because AI could do it at the lowest viable level. That's done, and no amount of sighing brings the past back.
What didn't get cheap is knowing what to produce, why, whether it's any good, and what to do when it flops.
Remember, the roles that survived in that study were more complex and paid more, and this is exactly why. Clients who wanted output found a cheaper source. Clients who want outcomes and results are still buying, and they're paying more than they used to.
4. You're a business. Mentally and practically.
This was always true (and it's what I've been talking about for years), but the market used to be forgiving enough that you could get away with ignoring it.
It isn't anymore.
A business knows its numbers, gets rid of services that aren't working, adds new services to meet client needs, and changes its revenue model when conditions change. A business recognizes the need for change and adaptation to maintain profit levels.
Which brings me to the last one.
5. Ten years of something working isn't evidence it still works.
It's evidence it used to. I know how uncomfortable that thought is when you've built a comfortable business on a particular model. But project-based, one-off deliverable work is the most at-risk model in this market. Retainers, advisory relationships, and fractional arrangements are where the professional end seems to be going.
Clients are placing value on knowledge, relationship, and experience as part of the final deliverable.
Flexibility, innovation, and experimentation are the rule of the day.
How does all of this apply to you?
You already have all of the building blocks you need to navigate the changes. The question is, do you want to? If you do, take a good look at some of the value you already bring to client relationships and make it part of your marketing and your process. Bring what the best clients are looking for to the table so you're the natural choice.
Start by making a list. Think about every time in the past year a client thanked you for something that wasn't the deliverable. Here are some examples from my year:
- I had a client thank me for a call where I talked them out of a bad idea.
- Another kept referring to a question I asked that reframed the entire project.
- One client signed me on as a consultant because of a problem I spotted that they'd been trying to figure out for months.
Write down every single one you can remember.
These are the things AI can't produce. They aren't factors that someone else can price lower. Most importantly, they're what this fewer-clients-bigger-checks market is actively seeking.
I know you think those things are just part of what you do, but they have real value to your clients. They show how you apply what you know, how you problem-solve and think strategically, and how you're going to make a difference in their business.
Then apply it. Take one item from that list and build it into one of your offers. It's probably already there, you're just making it part of the results. Include it in your discovery calls, proposals, or statements of work.
Then talk about it (make it part of your marketing). Post a case study of how you served a client and make sure you point out your solution instead of the deliverable. If nobody knows what you can do, they won't seek you out for it.
Final thoughts
So, is freelancing dying?
The commodity version? I think so. Maybe “dying” is too definitive a word, but it’s certainly shrinking. The combination of AI, increased competition, and clients who now expect commodity work to cost very little is making that model harder and harder to sustain.
That’s not because nobody will ever buy deliverables again. They will. But the economic forces are all pushing in the same direction.
The best version, the business professional version, is in a growth phase. I fully believe the people who treat what they do as a business and know their value can find a path forward.
I think there's as much potential today as there was three years ago. We just need to take off the blinders and look for it.
Cheers,
Treasa
