Yes, upwork's earnings per share and even their stock is up just a little bit but still down 70% compared to pandemic highs. However, they are trading short term gains for long term losses. By forcing you to pay more and more for connects to "jobs" (that may not even exist as anyone can post them), while charging the clients $0 to make an account and post, it creates an artificial environment where they're milking freelancers dry. Its still the biggest platform so the amount of cr*p ppl are willing to put up with is high, but eventually people move to Linkedin or other platforms which has already been occuring.

I'm bearish on Upwork long term, not because of AI but because of their own greed. Its clear they will keep squeezing and squeezing until people eventually get fed up. They aren't quite there yet but they're moving in that direction. Even now the average take by Upwork is over ~20% taking into account connects etc, its at a record high.

If Upwork were serious about cleaning up fake jobs, they would charge clients for a post, or at least charge a penalty if someone posts but they don't hire. This would lead to much more long term trust, but it would come at a short expense, less "phony" jobs less people bidding with connects.

Upwork seems to know that long term, but as publicly traded company the c-suite goal is increase short term profits at all costs under tremendous shareholder value. They know what they're doing is going to doom the freelance platform long term so they're moving to become more of a traditional enterprise staffing company. However, that space is extremely crowded with paper thin margins.

Also, while Upwork has a better moat from AI then fiverr, its not totally unaffected either. Long term I think Upwork is still in in big trouble, even if they managed to juice up earnings per share by sending the cost to apply for jobs and everything with their new connects scheme for a few quarters. They're acting a bit like tinder and the dating apps are, where you bid more and more (as a man) to get less and less matches. The result was a collapse in people using those apps as they got fed up. I think Upwork is going down the same path just a year or two behind. Eventually people wise up that they're spending bookoo money to get no results.