Fiverr is a website that invites people to nominate what they’d be prepared to do for $5.

After learning of its existence, I figured it was going to be jokey. And, indeed, there are some humorous ”gigs” (see below). However, Fiverr is a serious commercial site — it’s brimming with legitimate postings by service providers who are deadly serious about completing the jobs they offer (the site facilitates the transaction). It’s quite remarkable how much work some people will do for US$5.

Here are a few Fiverr gigs that caught my eye and/or made me smile:

• I will review your resume and give interview tips for $5
• I will draw a caricature of you for $5
• I will give you quick and easy-to-follow directions to make your computer run as fast as when you first bought it, or faster for $5
• I will join a forum you’re a member of and vehemantly disagree with someone you don’t like for 2 weeks or 100 posts for $5
• I will design a professional logo for your company, website for $5
• I will write either a love or breakup letter for $5
• I will send you 70 sexy and nude (soft and hard) homemade photos of my ex girlfriend Judith for $5 (oh dear)

Crowdsourcing might still be a controversial topic in some quarters, but it’s definitely here to stay. It’s the purest manifestation of internet-enabled globalisation. Crowdsourcing online is now a crowded marketplace, as evidenced by the success of websites sites such as elance, guru.com, Freelancer.com, DesignCrowd and 99Designs.

New entrants seeking to break through in the space need to offer something a little different to these established players. Comparable to the focus inherent in Twitter’s 140-character-per-tweet limit or Catchoftheday.com.au‘s ‘only available for 24 hours’ model, restrictive parameters such as Fiverr’s US$5 mandate lend an elegant simplicity to the offering.

I should point out that I can’t vouch for the quality or timeliness of anything that’s on offer — by way of research I ordered a $5 dollar logo for my Posterous blog and two days after deadline I’ve received nothing and the supplier hasn’t responded to two of my messages. So buyer beware.

But hey, it’s five bucks.

Via Lost At E Minor