Marketplace revenue

Marketplace revenue is the part of Upwork Inc.'s GAAP revenue earned from its self-service marketplace, chiefly the fees charged to freelancers, agencies and clients on payments, plus Connects, subscriptions and advertising products.

Upwork Inc. reports revenue in two lines, Marketplace and Enterprise, in its quarterly earnings release and in the revenue note and Key Financial and Operational Metrics table of the Form 10-Q and 10-K. Marketplace revenue is GAAP revenue, part of the audited total; it is the total with Enterprise revenue taken out. Into it go the freelancer service fee on each payment, the client marketplace fee, Connects bought to submit proposals, Freelancer Plus and other subscriptions, payment processing and foreign-exchange income, and the advertising products Upwork groups as ads and monetisation. The definition has not always been the same: Upwork recast the split from its annual report for 2023, moving Enterprise work out of the marketplace line, so earlier figures are only comparable when taken from a later filing that restates them.

The line is where almost all of Upwork's take is earned and where freelancers and agencies pay in. Marketplace revenue divided by gross services volume is, near enough, the take rate that talent actually experiences, because Enterprise revenue includes contract values that never pass through the fee structure.

Marketplace revenue is not the money freelancers earned. That is inside gross services volume, which is many times larger; the marketplace line is Upwork's share of it.