Today, there are many services - aggregators, where a demanding customer can try to find a voice for every taste. Offers on such sites are really very much, because it can register literally any person in a few minutes, and offer their services to the whole world.

Many customers eventually try to order voice over at Fiverr because this Israeli site is one of the most popular in the world of labor exchanges, which has well promoted its service on the Internet and often appears in the search results Google on the relevant search query.

Many of our regular voice actors used to have experience with this portal, so we did an analysis and tried to summarize all the main pitfalls when working with the project in this article.

Let’s start with the most important thing, which inevitably comes up when working with services like Fiverr - it is the quality of recorded sound. In fact, this is the main problem that you need to build on when working with the site, and the main reasons for it is that literally anyone, as we wrote above, can register on the site, even if he bought a microphone in the nearest hypermarket, or trying to read the sound directly onto the built-in microphone of his laptop. This is difficult to imagine in the field of professional recording, but on aggregators like Fiverr such voice talents with poor sound - very much. This is particularly true in less common languages in developing countries, such as Amazigh, Dari, Oromo, Pashto, Burmese, Urdu, and many others. In many languages it is not possible to find a single speaker with a quality sound.

Here is what our Hindi tale, Ramjash Haliputru, says about this:

I started with Fiverr because I needed to recruit customers. I have invested quite a lot of money in my home studio, one Neumann U 87 Ai microphone cost more than 2,000 USD. However, I was faced with a fatal dumping - competitors from my home country were working for infinitely little money to gain a base, and the worst thing is that many of them felt the sound on their smartphones. I have upgraded my profile on several aggregators and eventually moved to cooperation with recording studios, because it turned out to be too expensive to look for customers, and earnings on voice over with Fiverr did not suit me».

Our experience confirms that the Ramjash case only confirms the general rule. A large number of voice actors offer low-quality sound, and if sometimes an amateur listener is still able to appreciate the difference and, hearing a highly annoying background noise or a voiceless plastic sound, be disappointed in the talent, the sound of many of them seems quite acceptable in the sound of ordinary columns, however, when analyzing the file on professional monitors (the name of the studio speakers) the sound engineer can often hear unacceptable in the professional sphere artifacts, which is basically a defective sound.

In addition, additional sticks in the wheels of narrators who tried to invest and equip quality home studios, inserts the service itself: when loading its portfolio as a video file, it is automatically compressed to such an extent that the sound is perceived extremely negatively. And not every potential customer will guess, and will find in himself the desire to study all the files of each of the narrators, which are often provided in a chaotic order, audio mixed with video, in an attempt to understand: this is all the sound of a given speaker of such low quality, or this particular sample?

The presence of a huge number of voice actors on the site adds complications. Large variety is not always a blessing. Yes, on aggregator sites there is an internal rating system, which on the one hand helps to select the wheat from chaff. But not everything is so unambiguous.

Here’s what our British English speaker, Jeff Chatley, says:

«The variety of Fiverr announcers is driving me crazy. To develop your profile and get the attention of the customer, you need to work almost free for a very long time, and I could put a bad rating because the customer did not realize the realistic complexity of their project and could not formulate a clear task. But the worst part is that it was always very difficult for a potential client to get to my profile, because of the excessive choice of announcers, among which are always a lot of professions. At the same time there is sometimes another situation when beautiful voices on the service can not be excavated among hundreds of average, as they lack a rating and they can not break through just because no one knows about them».

This is really a big problem for any services that are built on a rating system. However, in the case of aggregators, it is always necessary to search for a long, thorough and painstaking search not only the right voice on timbre and pitch, but also every time trying to understand by sample, whether it is a studio quality, or not suitable, and the latter task can often be handled only by a professional sound engineer.

In addition, even having a rating of 5 stars and thousands of reviews - not always guarantees a good result. Through careful profiling, we have encountered a situation where announcers try to close down frankly bad reviews with a lot of good and correct their rating, relying on customers to look at the total number of stars and ratings without reading into details. However, if there are even 20 extremely negative reviews out of 1,000 - it is better not to work with such a broadcaster and it may fail you just as it failed one of these clients, who had bad luck. And these situations are not uncommon.

Today, there are many services - aggregators, where a demanding customer can try to find a voice for every taste. Offers on such sites are really very much, because it can register literally any person in a few minutes, and offer their services to the whole world.

Many customers eventually try to order voice over at Fiverr because this Israeli site is one of the most popular in the world of labor exchanges, which has well promoted its service on the Internet and often appears in the search results Google on the relevant search query.

Many of our regular voice actors used to have experience with this portal, so we did an analysis and tried to summarize all the main pitfalls when working with the project in this article.

From the previous topic, the conclusion is that the client never knows if the narrator told the truth about himself. In serious companies, as well as in our company, all the announcers with whom we work, are tested for the correspondence of the language, which is for him native, and on which the recording is made.

Unfortunately, the reality of any marketplace is such that the information that the announcer provides is not checked. When registering a new profile, Fiverr tried to solve this problem by calculating a person’s membership in a country by their IP address and not allowing the country to be changed. But who doesn’t know about a VPN these days? Its use makes it easy to simulate its location from anywhere in the world, and many take advantage of it.

What does this mean for the client? What he never really knows is whether the announcer is a native speaker, what he says on the profile, or whether he’s just a good foreigner, and he’s trying to make money off of it. We work exclusively with native speakers, however, in the same Fiverr often meet suggestions to record the video not in two, but in three or four languages! Can all factors fall into one: a professional actor with expensive and high-quality equipment records cheap videos in four languages, each of which he speaks as a native? We suggest you answer this question yourself.

As a result, the client never really knows if he or she wrote the truth about himself or herself. We’ve seen some interesting stories where announcers have listed among their regalia the achievements in contests that don’t exist at all. Or they wrote about 20 years of experience working at a radio station whose name is invented. Some dishonest announcers take advantage of the fact that the information is not checked, and you can attract customers with any beautiful words. That doesn’t mean, of course, that everything in the announcer profile is a lie. The service has really good announcers who have a lot of experience in voice acting. But first, to find such announcers in an infinite variety is quite difficult, and secondly, the price of such quality announcers is not so small, as usually attract customers marketplaces.

Often customers are attracted by a fairly low price, which is indicated for the work of announcers, which is the main incentive to consider cooperation with them. However, it should be borne in mind that many announcers indicate a small cost for a minimum job - for example, a few dozen words. If the volume increases, the cost is often no longer attractive. In addition, announcers on the go increase the cost for any additional services: cleaning and processing of sound, cutting, mastering, delivery within 24 hours, and so on.

The use of a record may be a particularly significant additional charge. One thing is just to record the video, and another is how and where you will use the yoke. Even simply posting on your website will require commercial rights, and this will be added to the cost of writing to Fiverr speakers. And if you need rights for broadcasting or placement on radio and TV, and also in different countries, be prepared for the fact that the original price for a clean record will be increased many times.

By the way, Fiverr retains quite a large commission from all announcers - at the time of writing this amount of 20%. By the way, the additional commission at the payment is also withheld from customers, in addition, the portal extremely unfavorable conversion rate from dollar to euro - this is a real reef in the sense that few people notice it. The fact is, which currency is selected as the main customer’s profile. If the dollar is chosen, for example, and the service provider puts the order in euros, then the amount is automatically converted on very unfavorable terms for the customer - if you still decide to order Fiverr voice over - always watch out, that the currency in the order on display always corresponds to the main currency of your choice - or change it to another, this is done with two clicks of mouse. On small amounts the difference is not so noticeable, but for payments over $ 100-200 the difference is already significant.

However, if the cost of some announcers slightly increases even with the addition of all the additional fees for the use of the rights, it is not difficult to consider that the announcer remains very little profit for the work. It should be understood that the field of recording requires certain, considerable financial investments. It is impossible to buy high-quality recording equipment and work for a small fee - and customers should understand this.

Special mention should be made of the talent of a particular speaker. Voice acting is always an actor’s game. Even in informational commercials the casting of the voice can be diverse, and there is nothing to say about the game videos.

We believe it is right to work only with professional voice actors (by the way, because of this there is a good chance that your video can be voiced by an actor who dubbed, for example, Star Lord from the «Guardians of the Galaxy» for some of the local markets). For marketplace actors dubbing is exotic because many of them consider it beneath their dignity to develop their profile on the marketplace and work in freelance.

What happens when the speaker does not develop the talent of the actor? Even if he has a beautiful and set voice, the duplicates will be monotonous. Acting skills are very important in the field of sound recording. Many announcers do not want to get involved with complex projects where acting is required (understandably, with low incomes enthusiasm decreases proportionally), especially when the customer needs an online session. It often happens that even when the speaker is chosen and interested in the work, after the word «online session» he disappears.

The reasons for this are not only financial, but also more prosaic: some simply can not give the right tone and tone. When working with speakers, we do not just offer an online session, but all our recordings are accompanied by an artistic director. This specialist takes a close look at the project and studies the details, and directs the recording process, guiding the announcer in the right way to achieve the best result.

It is worth mentioning that even if after a long and complex search to find a speaker who will be ready for the cost acceptable to the customer to write your text, there is never a guarantee that these services will be performed, as you work with an individual.

One of our regular customers became so after the selected announcer with an excellent rating gave it by deadlines, although it guaranteed the timely provision of services. At the same time, the service agrees to return the prepayment, but it often happens that the issue of the deadline is more important than financial, and to find an alternative not the most reliable announcer can be difficult and time consuming.

Recording voice over at Fiverr without a doubt has its pitfalls, which we have described in detail above. Many use this service, and it is really justified when you need to voice some budget product, such as a presentation for a corporate event. We respect this portal and, no doubt, it is not for nothing so popular with users.

However, to find there a real high-quality announcer at a good price - you need to spend a lot of time and have at least some significant knowledge of sound engineering to make the right conclusion about the sound characteristics of a certain announcer.

When working with Fiverr you need to keep in mind all the risks that come with this service: