Voice123 Goes Downmarket

As far as pay-to-play internet voiceover sites go, Voice123 has been a pioneer and a standard in the industry. That's still true, but now the site forges ahead with new standards of going downmarket. Largely, it's been a victim of its own success. The number of talent subscriptions has at least doubled in the past few years, which has thoroughly diluted the talent pool. It's harder for good talents to be heard or found which is bad for both the quality talents and quality "voice seekers" from potential clients. I know many high quality talents (even some personally, not just on the internet) who left voice123 because they simply could not get gigs through all the rabble. As of today there are 3342 talents (not all have Premium Subscriptions whereby they can audition for leads) fighting for the handful of gigs which pop up each day. Most of these leads are for jobs under $250 (less than the subscription cost).

In my first two years on voice123 won a few auditions each year and received a handful of jobs through private leads. One of these leads became my best e-learning client for whom I continue to work, and I'm thankful to voice123 for these opportunities. Also, I received many direct calls for jobs by people who heard me on the site and decided to go right to the source and call me. So in the past, voice123 has been a great marketing tool for not a lot of money...especially since I spent very little time actually auditioning.

In the past year, I've auditioned nearly a hundred times. I won a decent job for the voice of a DVD manual and another for a podcast introduction, but received only four private leads. I intentionally market myself as an Atlanta Voiceover talent, but I'm buried in their search engine. A talent from Phoenix came up as their #8 Atlantan voiceover talent the last time I checked. Certainly nobody deserves gigs: you earn them, and luck has a bit to do with it too. However, I've heard from many other talents who are frustrated with the diminishing ROI that voice123 provides. Again, the source of this problem is their success in attracting more competetive talent, but also a sinking boat full of wannabees. I listened to 50 v123 talents at random yesterday and honestly, four were of a pro level and two of the four were nondescript (boring). When you're with an agency, you're not one of 3342 roster talents. Also, most of those 3342 aren't rank amateurs who don't know what a pop-filter is.

As a result of the dilution of the "talent" in the Voice123 talent base, it's clear that the quality voice seekers have been turned off by the service. There is an increasing number of revised auditions from seekers dissatisfied with all of the talents who initially replied. Most leads these days are cheap, paying less than going market rates; and cheaper than those of other pay-to-play sites who have also seen their service go slightly downmarket, it should be noted.
Too many of the jobs are for joke sites or animations of no real marketable purpose, un-ethical nutritional supplements and get-rich-quick tutorials, or vague international products written with even vaguer rules of grammar. Voice123 has become an excellent downmarket marketing tool for the bottom-feeding clients and voice-talkers to get together and share shoddy services in exchange for hissy unprofessional files and late low paychecks.

Has Voice123 become the Black Market of voiceovers? No, but as the economy sours and desperate amateurs flood the talent roster, this Market has a darkening shade of gray.