2022 business update. My name is Matt Barrie, and I'm the Chief Executive of Freelancer Limited. Today, with me today, I've got Neil Katz, Chief Financial Officer, Adam Byrnes, the VP of Product and Growth, and Sean McMeekin, the VP of Enterprise. Today I'll be presenting the business update, and as always, you may ask Q&A to anyone in the room after the update's been provided. In the third quarter, Freelancer Limited delivered gross payment volume of AUD 242.4 million, down 14.2%, or in $165.8 million, down 20.1%. Present GMV was AUD 31.5 million, down 5.1% on PCP or $.2.1.5 million, down 11.6% .
The GPV for Escrow was AUD 200 million, down 16.2% or AUD 136.8 million, down 22%. The group net cash receipts were, despite the drops in GMV, they held flat, at AUD 13.5 million, down 1.5%. The Freelancer cash receipts were AUD 11.2 million, down 1.4% on PCP, and the Escrow cash receipts were AUD 2.3 million, down 1.9%. FX was a tailwind of 7% in the quarter. Approximately 74% of the group revenue is in U.S. dollars and 7% in Australian dollars.
We had negative net operating cash flow of AUD 3.2 million for the quarter, compared to AUD 1.6 million the year before, and ended with cash and cash equivalents of AUD 28.6 million, down 2.7% on PCP. Moving into each of the segments. In terms of Freelancer, obviously, we had a series of, you know, pretty awful macroeconomic events, which deteriorated sharply from May. Initially, we had the crypto crash, took a fair bit of millennial wealth, and that led to a broader tech wreck. Coupled with the highest inflation over 40 years and also the worst living standards in 56 years, since 1956, which crimped budgets, as living standards deteriorated.
Additionally, the war in Ukraine has cost us about 3% of GMV due to people not being on the platform. Also we're in the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, which seasonality was actually very highly pronounced this year compared including COVID. The general impression that we've got from talking to clients and talking to customers and so forth is, you know, they've pretty much gone fishing for the summer, given the weather situation in May, June and July. However, that having been said, there are quite a number of things that are positive on the horizon. From August first, we saw a broad-based lift in our statistics across the board, which has continued to now.
I will detail this in a second in quite a bit of detail across Freelancer and the Escrow businesses. In September as well, we also rectified a long-standing problem in the core marketplace that has been with us for a number of years. You know, this is something that I think will be very positive, and I'll get to some of the statistics on that and the results we got from our testing. That's live in production. We really do expect that it'll be quite a positive thing moving forward from here in the core marketplace.
Also, we do believe that while, you know, it was initially negative in terms of the macro environment, that will play into our favor if we do head into a pretty horrible 2023. We will see all the things that we saw in COVID and all the things we saw in the global financial crisis, which are really three items. One is that people will be looking for jobs online. We've already seen an uptick in that. Number of U.S. citizens looking to sign up to the platform has increased from about 33,000 a month to 42,000 since June. We will see a lot of businesses looking to cut costs online, as we saw in COVID and we saw in the GFC. We'll also see a lot of startup businesses being formed.
In the Fast 50 that we've just released, and I actually did an interview at midnight with CNBC last night. You know, the jobs we are seeing come in the platform at the moment are growing very, very strongly. Are the very same sort of jobs we saw during COVID, where, you know, things like Android app development, people are starting startup businesses. You know, it's building apps, building websites and so forth, and looking to have these sort of start-up businesses to bridge them through the bad times to the good times. I think ultimately that will play in our favor. If you look here, for example, at the number of projects posted, these are good projects. This is removing spam and so forth.
You can see that from really August 1st, we, you know, had a broad lift in projects being posted on the platform. That's also been replicated in new depositing employers. These are customers that have signed up, clients that have stuck their credit card in and paid money to the platform. You can see in May just how sharp decline was when we had this economic correction. It trended down through the Northern Hemisphere summer, but from the 1st of August, it has been lifting. In fact, these new depositing employers, they're in the U.S. They're quality. They're exactly the demographic we'd want to be on the platform posting projects. That's very positive. In terms of non-rookies, these are not new customers.
These are existing customers that are using the platform. Obviously, there's a lot more because about 66% of projects on the website at any point in time are from repeat customers versus new customers. Again, you can see that trend through August and so forth. There's a lift up in terms of the milestones being placed on the platform. That's paid money. What we care about is the GPV most of all. You can see there's been a lift since August in the growth, in the gross payment volume. While we had a hit over the Northern Hemisphere summer quarter, you can see that we've got a high point here in October. This is also replicated in the Escrow stack.
You know, it was a tough quarter, but we are seeing a recovery across both the businesses. We've got a great hit in The Wall Street Journal. This is a front page sort of story on freelancing. Again, as I mentioned a second ago, we're getting a hit this week at CNBC. I just did an interview last night on that. We are, you know, we are through the press team. The PR team is firing, which is good.
Now getting into a little bit more detail on the core marketplace, 'cause I know this is a question that will probably come up in the Q&A, and there's been a lot of people kind of saying, you know, what's going on in the core marketplace. When can we see some really strong growth happening there. There has been an issue that we've fortuitously discovered. It's an issue that has unfortunately been with the business for a number of years. It's kind of crept into the code base, and this really goes around how projects are set up in the main non-hire me funnels. This is the funnel where people post projects, freelancers bid on them, they're awarded, they're accepted and so forth.
Effectively, what's happened is that over time, in the last few years, there's been a bug or a feature, I don't know how you want to describe it, where, when you award the project to a freelancer, the freelancer will then say, "I want a certain amount of money to be put in the system in order to show that you're credible and you're real to get going." That percentage of money that's been requested from the freelancer up front has been creeping up and up over time. Now there's a couple different reasons why it's been creeping up. One is because simply there's a prompt in that was in one of the code bases that made a suggestion for what an initial default value would be.
The second is that there's been a much greater use of automated tools, software, both open source and commercial products that the freelancers have been using to assist them in their bidding. These products range from just, you know, enhanced tools to more specifically target projects that the freelancers like based upon their certain parameters and filters, right through to actual bots which are, you know, effectively spanning the marketplace and just hoping that someone will reply and win them a project. This has crept in over time. You know, these sort of tools kind of affect really every marketplace. On eBay, you've got sniping tools that come in and kind of snipe the auction last minute.
You know, in some ways it's good validation of just how popular we are that there's so many tools out there to do this, but it has become a problem over time in combination with an issue that was in one of the code bases. It became more pronounced over time as we deprecated the various native mobile code bases, the legacy mobile web code base, and merged in, so we've got one code base. The great thing about that is the one code base has made us a lot more productive. We don't have four separate engineering teams working on four separate products. This issue became more and more pronounced over time.
In fact, the unfortunate thing is that the order in which we kind of integrated those code bases didn't really make the issue become that obvious until we really merged in the platforms where the freelancers are bidding the most. For example, the Android app platform, which is the last code base to be merged in. Now these tools and so forth, the software has resulted in a lot of liquidity in the marketplace in a very real-time nature. You post your project and you get, you know, 80% of people bidding within, you know, effectively 60 seconds and so forth, or 70 seconds.
It has led to a bit of frustration from our clients with bids coming too fast and the freelancers not reading the bids properly, as well as creating friction because they're asking for more. They've been asking for more and more money up front to start the project. Now, obviously from a freelancer's perspective, freelancers want all the money up front because that's the best situation for them, right? If all the money's being paid up front, then that's great. The freelancer comes in and, you know, he knows all the money is there. The problem is that that is quite a lot of friction on high-end projects, right?
You know, if you're dealing with a project that's $1,000, $2,000, $5,000, and so forth, asking a client for the first time who's never used the website before to put in that sort of money is a big ask and introduces quite a bit of friction. That's kind of crept in with bots, and it's crept in with the merger of code bases. Now we had initial attempts last quarter to try to fix this problem. The issue that has meant that it took us into this quarter to actually resolve it is the fact that, you know, when we push changes to the website, we do that in a very well-structured and organized manner using what's called A/B testing framework.
We have quite a sophisticated framework that we've built that uses quite a lot of statistics and data science to know that there's actual, you know, there's not correlation, it's causation. There's something we've changed on the website has led to a certain output with surety as opposed to, you know, something just happens. It happens to happen at the same time, it's correlated. The issue is that framework is in the front end of the website, and a lot of these automated tools the freelancers have been using is in the back-end API, which kind of bypass that framework.
When we made initial attempts to try and fix this problem, because you might think it might be relatively easy, the problem is that most of the quick bidders, the bidders that came in super quick, have been from APIs, tools, various bits of software and so forth, which basically obscured it from the client's perspective. If you post your project, then all these automated tools and so forth will start popping in and it becomes a bit of a problem because when the real bidders come in, they come in, you know, a couple of minutes later, but by then you've already seen all these bots come in requesting all the money up front and so on and so forth. We had to solve this bot problem first.
It's a bit of a technology war because, you know, it's a bit like high-frequency trading, where, you know, high-frequency traders will try and lower the latency as much as possible. They're close to the exchange as possible in order to get their trades in quickly. The same thing is happening with bids 'cause with the Freelancer, it's all about can you get in front of the client the fastest, get that relationship formed. A bit like if you walk into a market in an emerging marketplace in an emerging market. You walk into the market, what you wanna buy. Do you wanna buy shoes? Do you wanna buy handbags? Do you wanna buy.
People get in front of you really quickly to try and get that client relationship, and then they try and fulfill at the back end. We had to solve that problem, and we actually managed to successfully do it in the quarter, which is great. You can see this graph here that it was previously within 30 seconds you had a little bit under 50% of the bids coming in. That's too quick to actually read and write a well-crafted proposal. It was probably quite. The first time you use the website, you might go, "Wow. Look at all this liquidity." The second and third times, you realize they're not reading it, your brief properly, and it's a bit of an issue. We solved that problem.
You can see there that the good bidders were unaffected. The bidders that came in, you know, less than 5 minutes, but it read a minute and a half. A minute and a half is where we've kind of benchmarked the fastest that a human can possibly read a brief, properly think about it, and write a reply. You know, those bidders were unaffected, but we kind of found a way to slow down the bots effectively. The assistant software bidders. We managed to solve that.
We wanna do it in a very, very careful way because attempts, you know, to fiddle with, you know, a marketplace with sentient beings with a profit objective on both sides, you can get all sorts of unexpected consequences, you know, where you try and make things better, you might make things a bit worse. We managed to successfully do that. Took a lot of care, and then we managed to solve the problem in terms of reducing the amount of upfront payment was being required. We A/B tested this. You know, if anyone wants to follow up and go through the report with us, it's actually quite fascinating. There's quite a number of insights there.
We saw that over 21 days, the gross marketplace value from fixing this actually lifted by about 17% for non-rookies, so these experienced users. Client activity in general and economic activity after one week was up 4%. Propensity to post a second job and not churn, which is a really big one here, was up 18% in the week. Hire a second freelancer within two weeks, up 6%. We saw a fairly big increase across the board. It was a very positive result. In many ways it's intuitive because we ask for a lot of money up front. You know, obviously, for some clients, they're gonna churn.
If you know, the average project size is a little under AUD 300, and I'll get to that in a second, but the median project size is AUD 80. For the projects AUD 80 and under, asking for AUD 80 up front is not an issue, right? We've left the site, you know, to basically, you know, whatever the freelancers wanna ask, they can ask. But above that, when you start getting into the AUD 500, AUD 1,000 and so forth, it's unreasonable to ask for a huge amount of money up front because you've never worked with that freelancer before, potentially. You just wanna get going, put enough to fund the project and so forth.
We think there's some very positive things happening here in the core marketplace, and we think these retention effects will continue to play on for, you know, a very long term. We're gonna see, you know, some very positive effects here. We're very confident about this. In terms of the supply and demand, we added 1.5 million users in the third quarter. As I said a second ago, U.S. Freelancers lifted to about 42,000 from 33,000, in the month, from the month of June to September. We're seeing a big uplift in U.S. sign-ups, which is fantastic. The average project size lifted to $256, which is up 13.3% on PCP.
Now, that's just been trending up over time, but we also think that freelancers are lifting the rates in which they're bidding on projects because of, you know, inflation and all the things that are happening in the world. We did see a big lift there in terms of the average project size. In terms of acquisition, you know, we've got obviously organic channels. We've got paid channels. One big thing we've been talking about in the previous quarterly reports is the paid channels, where, you know, we talked about what happened last year and so forth. You know, I'm pleased to say that's well under control. In fact, the numbers are actually better than this now.
In terms of the return on investment for our paid channels, it's performing very well and looks to be reasonably profitable, which is fantastic. Right now we're really just focusing on lifting the volume up in that paid channel. It's looking fantastic. We have a great return on investment there. We did this all while reducing our costs in terms of search engine marketing. We reduced them by about 30% just on the last quarter alone, the second quarter of the year to the third quarter of the year. We've now got a big focus on the organic channels such as SEO and so forth.
We expect to get some good lifts in the remainder of the year from that, 'cause it's where we're putting our focus. In terms of the product, we talked about three objectives of the year, and they remain the same. I won't go into the detail, but, you know, we are improving the visual design and so forth. Our collaborative features are also assisting with the average project size being lifted. Quotations was one example of one of the things we've pushed. Still relatively early days, but a millions of dollars of GMV have gone through this already. It's basically the ability for a freelancer to send a quote to anyone. At the moment, anyone on the platform. Very shortly it'll be anyone on the internet. Effectively it's how the real world works.
You know, a plumber comes to your house, they give you a quote. The quote may have a mixture of things in it, such as, you know, 20 hours at $50 an hour, 10 hours at $35 an hour for my apprentice, parts, maybe a call out fee, et cetera and so on. That's going well. In terms of video bids, we're now introducing a lot of interactivity through video on the platform. We've basically made it now so that if you're a verified freelancer, you can actually record a video on your bid, which actually breaks through and actually creates a bit of empathy between the client and the freelancer.
What was very interesting about this is that when we pushed this live, it lifted the award rate by a couple of percent across the board, not necessarily to the freelancers that were bidding with video bids, but it creates enough interactivity in the marketplace to actually wanna spend time to look through the rest of the bids and actually find the freelancer that they wanna proceed to. We'll be using a lot more video across the platform in a lot of different places. One place we'll be using them is groups. So you can think of groups as similar to Facebook groups. So these are basically a. It scales from a communications platform for very small groups of people, three, four, five people working on a project together.
You can think of it like a group you might see on Facebook. You know, you get a feed, and people can write status updates and respond and share files and so forth. We've also integrated task lists, so you can actually have tasks for people to perform in that little workroom. It also scales up to millions of users. In fact, if you jump on the platform today, we have over 6 million users in groups, and some of the individual groups now have over 3 million or 4 million users in them, in the one single group. We've managed to implement that in a way where we're not getting huge amounts of spam, where you know, there's great.
There's conversations forming, there's relationships forming and real engagement forming. Shortly when you log in and you see the newsfeed, you'll see a completely different experience where you'll get a mix of the things you're working on, as well as the, you know, the buzz and the hum of activity that's happening on the platform. We think that's gonna really lift engagement in a big way. We also made a number of improvements to task lists. Anyone that's worked in engineering or product before knows that your backlog, which is, you know, all the tickets related to bug features and fixes and so forth, these things grow forever because they capture all your dreams and aspirations as well as all the things you wanna improve or fix on the platform.
We've built that into the platform itself. It's a bit like Jira from Atlassian, a very primitive version of that, or Trello. Many people have probably used Trello. This will be building out to more and more functionality. It's also integrated into groups. You could have a group of freelancers working with your trade workers, and you have a bunch of tasks allocated to people and timelines and so forth. You basically what it does is it creates more and more work to be done on the platform. More and more work is more and more GMV on the platform. We did all that through our design system, which is improving in leaps and bounds, which is fantastic. You can see that as you use the platform.
It's getting better and better and better in terms of how things look and feel, and I'm very confident by the end of the year, we're gonna have a really good-looking product. We also reduced a lot of spam on the platform. This is a bugbear that is hitting everyone at the moment. You know, if you look at the news at the moment, Elon Musk is supposed to be closing the Twitter acquisition on Friday, and the number one topic is spam on the Twitter platform. It's everywhere. In bad economic times, there's a profit motive from spammers, and so they become more pronounced, particularly during COVID. We've been battling it like everyone else has been battling it.
We've very successfully reduced the number of spam accounts closed in one hour in the first half from 78% closed in one hour compared to only 48% in the year before. We've made a lot of improvements there, and in the third quarter, we continue to solidify that, and we will keep building on that. In all of that, enterprise has done pretty well. Sean's obviously here with me, and at the end, you can address any Q&A to him. The GMV in the third quarter for enterprise did grow 99% year-on-year, which is very positive.
There's quite a lot of really big things happening here that I will talk about in a little bit of detail here. If you wanna get into the nitty-gritty, you can ask Sean a bit later on. One we talked about some time is we've been working with a global computer and printer company to basically do field services for the repairs of computers and printers in many countries around the world, right? We have just completed the integration of the Freelancer system with their system. It's called EDG. So that the jobs, when they come into the company's website to repair my computer or printer, automatically get injected to our website. There's a whole workflow where field service technicians will get allocated a job. They choose the job. There's a map.
They get tracked. They've gotta take photos of the parts. They then go through a whole step, you know, multi-step process, which is on par with exactly the process that these field service technicians do if they're badged working for this particular company. That is getting turned on literally tomorrow, and Friday or Monday will be the commissioning for Australia and New Zealand. Then India will be about two weeks after that in terms of the commissioning. You just had Diwali this week, which has kind of delayed things a little bit. We're live at the moment in eight cities in India, going to 18. We're live in six cities in Indonesia, six in Australia, and two in New Zealand. That's also expanding. These are both regional and metro areas. Malaysia is imminently turning on.
Sean, I forget the date on that, but it's literally imminent. The integration will not just step up by an order of magnitude, but actually quite a bit more than that. You know, in India alone, there's 660,000 jobs a year that are the overall break/fix jobs. We will get a reasonable percentage of that. We've also now been green-lighted for installation jobs as well. There's actually a lot more installation jobs than break/fix jobs, and it's actually an easier job 'cause you're just installing a computer or printer as opposed to diagnosing, fixing, and potentially doing some hardware engineering. This is going very well. It's integrated, and step-up's gonna happen literally from next week onwards across all these different regions.
In addition, we're about to close Turkey and the Middle East, which is Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and I believe Dubai. I'll even talk about that a bit later on when we get into the detail. We've got a huge engagement. It's with a trillion-dollar market cap technology company. It's very similar in the way to what we're doing with the computer and printer company, but it's in the area of customer support. It's a flexible, dynamic customer support, 24/7 operation, which in multiple languages for particular products for this trillion-dollar software company. Everyone has this software installed on one of the computers in their home or their office. It's a well-known household name.
I can't mention it just yet, but when we soon, hopefully, we'll be able to mention the name. We're basically done all the onboarding now and with the go-live date, ideally, in January of next year, possibly before then. January is kind of, I think, where we're targeting that. We've also got quite a lot of things happening with BPO providers and contingent workforce providers. We have now six of the large global BPOs signed in MSAs. One of the six is actually through a partner of theirs, so it's not direct. We're obviously stitching up all the big BPO players and volumes are ramping very well there.
Also with contingent workforce management in North America, where we are looking to integrate into their vendor management systems for labor,, because they all need a freelance component and none of them have it. These are the big workforce. You know, for example, we've got a existing relationship with Manpower, which is tapped in. There are many businesses like this. I won't tell you the exact names, but I'll tell you who's in the industry. Randstad, Adecco, you know, KellyOCG, PERSOLKELLY. You know, those sort of companies that we're working with. There's potentially shortly some engineering services integrating into those platforms. Deloitte. We have integrated now. It's live. The cloud, external cloud is live. Projects are flowing.
We're at the point where we're looking at really scaling up the adoption. We've got the first couple of projects through that that you know tested all the compliance processes, all the queues, the quality control, and there's some really good results there in terms of liquidity. Even though there's a relatively small pool of external freelancers, they gave out on average about eight bids per job versus the internal pool, which is close to four. There's about double the liquidity coming from the external freelancers as from the internal. Now it's really the job to just to scale this up and get those you know 50,000 consultants posting jobs and really building up the GMV. We've got some pretty lofty numbers that have been provided to us by Deloitte.
Now it's really down to the change management and the activation side to get that going. That's integrated. Now there's obviously still ongoing engineering service work we're doing. There's still some features we wanna turn on and enable and so forth. But the great thing is it's ready to start scaling the GMV, and we'll start seeing. Yeah. What's also scaling is NASA. We won the biggest task order to date just recently. It's $6.7 million, which is a bit over AUD 10 million. The biggest task order before them was about one point something million. You can see there's a big step up there.
Obviously, we talked about for some time how the contract has gone from a $25 million contract of GMV in revenue to $175 million. Of that initial $25 million, about $12 million-$13 million has been awarded. We've won about $4.3 million prior to the $6.7 million grant, which has just come through. Task order that's just come through. This is for gene editing. We're looking at novel ways, both in vivo and ex vivo, of doing gene therapy in humans, targeting the central nervous system and so forth. You can see here, this is about as high-end a project as you can get. It's about as high-end a client as you can get.
It's very high-end in terms of the dollar value of the work, and we expect to see a lot more of this. We've just actually done a live visit to Texas with our NASA team. We're actually the only vendor to actually ever visit NASA for a part of this program, the NOIS program. They're very excited about that, and there's a lot of ways we're gonna work together. There's also NOIS three coming, which will be even bigger, we believe, than the $175 million for NOIS two. Everything's kind of scaling up in a big way. NASA's really acting as a center of excellence for the whole of U.S. government.
As you can see here, this $6.7 million task order is with the National Institutes of Health. We've worked with, you know, CDC. We've worked with Department of Commerce, Department of Energy. We've worked with, you know, NIST. There's a $1 million task order right now to build a Minority Report-style dashboard for instant response for NIST, et cetera, and so forth. You know, Bureau of Reclamation and so on. That's gonna wrap. That's gonna ramp up a lot. We've also just started as well exploring going directly to these government departments after we've done work with them for follow-on. We've also been invited to bid on another bit of work with NASA.
There's a contract that's expiring shortly with them, and we're putting a submission in around InSource for that. That's looking fairly positive in terms of what we've seen so far. In addition, we've got a whole range of different clients. I haven't got the time to go through all of them on the enterprise side. There's one called out here where there's commercials and program management work that's continuing with a EUR 40 billion enterprise in Europe on energy. We also brought in a very experienced sales executive, Frankie Wong, who's been working for the last 20 years at about, I think, five years at IBM, four years at Cognizant, which provides effectively BPO labor services.
It's actually one of the enterprise clients in our pipeline, and Verizon selling telco services. Cloud services, telco services, and labor services to enterprise 20-something years has been a great addition. A little more traditional about Deloitte, what we hear, about 39,000 people on the platform already, 180,000 hours. The average project size actually at the moment is about, I think, $2,100. That's fantastic. We're obviously targeting 52,000 users. They're going to 252,000 when we include the wider U.S.-India group, and that's just Deloitte Consulting U.S. We have some other engagements right now with other countries around the world, in terms including the U.K., Australia, and Switzerland, as well as tax, which is another completely different part of Deloitte.
On average, the external projects have a minimum budget of AUD 195, and the maximum budget is AUD 3,500, average about AUD 2,100. The average bid count is about 8.4 for external freelancers, and it's a little bit higher than that actually for internal now. It's a little bit closer to four in terms of the average number of bids. They're getting quite a healthy number of bids on their projects. Well, 12 bids in overall on both internal and external for project. That will continue to lift as we onboard more freelancers. Deloitte has agreed to double the size of the external pool already. We're doing that in the process of doing that right now. That's all going very, very well.
There's more engineering services work that we'll be continuing through the rest of the year, building out features and adding new things to the platform. You can see it looks. It's quite a beautiful product. It's the result of many years of work, and it's also the foundation for InSource, which we're taking to a bunch of other enterprise clients. We've got a number of pilots lined up for that, across the world in various sectors. Going into a little more detail about this computer and printer company. You know, there's a lot of work we've done here. There's a whole workflow, as I talked about, in terms of how the field service technicians work.
We're doing everything for this particular company, including recruiting of field services technicians, training them, quality control, on-ground management, parts warehousing and delivery, and routing. All the logistics around that. The case tracking with the EAG integration, all the. You know, there's photographs of being on site, photographs of the parts. You know, there's you know, you have the customer signature, just like, for example, you get a DHL delivery or you get someone to repair something in your house, you sign off on the screen and so on. It's quite a great solution that's been there. It's been paid in terms of the engineering work, and there's a lot of ramp up that's coming right now, starting next week. Australia will be Friday/Monday.
India will be about two weeks after that, in terms of being turned on with EAG. It will ramp up, and there's a lot of volume coming through there. There's about 99 field service technicians now that have been hired in the existing network. That's gonna ramp up now that EAG has been done. We've got a whole training and QA organization and management organization. This whole org structure here that is working for this company through Global Fleet. Every single role in this org structure is freelance with the exception of the program manager global. We have one person internally managing this whole thing for them, which is amazing.
It shows the scale and the power of freelancing, and with a few little modifications to our platform, how we can manage a network like this very effectively. That's going very well. There's more detail in various countries. I won't get into that, but we're both regional and metro. Malaysia's about to start. Turkey's about to start. Saudi Arabia's about to start. Dubai's about to start. There's a video as well you can watch in your own time, A Day in the Life of a Freelancer Field Engineer. That's actually if you go to our Freelancer.com channel on YouTube, you'll be able to see it.
There's a link there, and you'll actually see what's actually happening, what technicians are working, how they're working, why they're working on the platform, why they love it, et cetera, and so on. It might surprise you 'cause it's probably a bit different from what you expect. This kinda shows some of the screenshots in terms of the workflow. They're very high level. There's quite a number of different things that happen, and it exactly mirrors the conventional workflow. What we're doing is we're really transforming the workforce for field services here, transforming it by making it global with the one platform. At the moment, there's a patchwork in 53 different countries. There's a patchwork of outsource providers or badged employees that provide this service for that particular company.
We're now global, one platform, and we're doing it dramatically cheaper. It's about one-third of the cost in many regions to get things done versus traditional methods. We can see a lot of expansion there, not just in break-fix, but also in new installations. In terms of NASA, I'll skip through this pretty quickly 'cause I've talked about this before, but we're doing some stuff on water conservation with the Bureau of Reclamation and the USDA. I've talked about with NIST, what we're doing with this is a $1 million task order live right now for this minority report dashboard. There's pictures of the contest site there for that. We talked about the $6.7 million task order for gene editing.
There's some details about what we're doing there, but you can see it's extremely sophisticated work. No one can say on Freelancer, you can't get sophisticated work done. This is about as complex of work as you can get possibly done in the world, and you don't see this on any of the competitors' platforms at all. You don't see this at all. As part of doing this, what's happening here as well is the National Institutes of Health is building an approved talent network. They're building a network of talent that has entered this competition that can be used for ongoing work for different things that is already, you know, you're already somewhat vetted because you've seen the quality of the work they've done that's submitted in the form of the task order itself.
All of this goes to building really sophisticated high-end talent pools, which can be used by the NIH or any other one of our enterprise clients. In addition, we completed a bunch of task orders in the quarter. I won't get into too much detail there, but again, this is very high-end, sophisticated work. You know, very technical in nature. You know, for example, here, edge processing observability platform for continuous hydroelectric plant protection. You don't find this in competitors' businesses, right? It's all very high-end, complex work. You see the big step up there in Australian dollars, AUD 10.6 million for that task order, and the closest task order previously has been AUD 2 million.
You know, we're gonna see a step up in volume and a step up in value for the work coming through NASA as NOIS II starts kicking in, which is imminent. Now, Escrow in the quarter did have a fairly large drop in gross payment volume, but it had a very marginal effect on receipts. The drop was 22% in U.S. dollars or 16% in Australian dollars, down to $200 million. This is purely attributed to large value domains, basically transaction volume over summer drying up, right? The pricing of those domains remains very high. You know, transactions are going through. In fact, in the last two weeks, and I'll show you in a second, we've had a big recovery post summer.
We're seeing, still seeing big pricing in these domains, and the domain prices continue to appreciate. We just published a second quarter Domain Investment Index that we'll show you there. We've had some very big growth over the last couple of years. This is trailing 12 months to June. You can see there, trailing 12 months to June of this year, AUD 519 million in volume going through, growing. But really it hit that, you know, that June month, June, July, August, and you saw a big drop. I'll show you what it looks like right here in terms of the GPV. It just hit June, and you saw a big drop in terms of volume.
In the last two weeks it's kind of recovered, and we'll see if this week it'll do the same. Effectively, you know, it was just during summer, these big $5 million, $10 million, $15 million domain names basically stopped trading as the brokers and so forth just went on holiday. I mean, we were at NamesCon in Texas in August, September. You know, it was all the talk. Basically, everyone's effectively gone fishing for the summer because, you know, obviously you had the crypto crash, you had the tech wreck, you had venture capitalists pull back in funding of startups. Startups, new startups are big purchasers of large value domains. You know, for example, I'll give you an example of these sort of domains. HubSpot earlier this year bought Connect.com for $10 million, right.
You know, we've sold Meta.com to Facebook. We've sold, you know, Crypto.com. We sold ETH.com, NFTs.com, NFT.com. You know, a lot of them were some of the big sort of domain names from the last year or so. You know, some of that crypto stuff has pulled back. The VC-funded startups investments have pulled back. In the last quarter, VC investments into startups was about $80 billion, which is down 53% from the year before. It was about, close to about $170 billion in the quarter for the year prior. So if that funding dries up, then these mega domains dry up. When you get into the actual transaction counts and so forth, the escrow business, the transaction count has recovered.
In fact, year-on-year, it was basically flat through this period. It's really just these mega domain things, the issue. You can see that in the last two weeks, you know, and we've done actually over $10 million in GBP. You can see that has come out of summer, and everybody's come back to work and things continuing. In addition, we made a number of things to improve the product. We built effectively a tracker. A bit like FedEx, you type in a code, and it tells you exactly where your transaction is. The goal of that is to provide a better experience for our customers as well as reduce our support costs.
Because most, you know, the vast majority of calls that come into the contact center for support for escrow is, "Where's my money?" That makes things easier and better for people. We also broadened the ability to buy and sell things in different categories. I won't get into a lot of detail there. In terms of partner activity, the one thing I will lead with was the disappointing thing and the most disappointing for the group as a whole has been Autotrader. We did a lot of work for Autotrader. There were 88 screens of integrated work with Blinker, who organized the financing marketplace as well as, you know, hand in hand, we developed effectively a platform for buying, selling, financing cars.
Now, for whatever reason, and we can't get a straight answer out of Autotrader, other than they've decided to temporarily halt consumer to consumer activity and focus on business to consumer. You know, they put it live for 2,500 listings. Even within a week to two weeks, a very short period of time, we didn't see any transactions come through on our side. Effectively, they turned it off. We're still trying to figure out what happened. It was in the middle of summer this all occurred. Blinker is now working with us to go to other automotive marketplaces. The solution is portable. That is actually a negative thing that we had all this work, all this expectation and so forth.
Explicitly, we haven't got a good answer out of Autotrader about why they've paused. We never saw a loan application came through. It wasn't even rolled out to a pilot. That was a negative thing. In terms of other marketplaces, look, we've seen, you know, a number of platforms integrate us. We've seen some pretty good rising volume out of marketplaces like Flippa, where January to September was up 166%. You have a number of IP address platforms, and so forth. Home renovation marketplace was starting into construction, and so on. We attended next call.
What we've done with the sales team is the sales team now reports into Sean McMeekin, who's done such a great job on the enterprise side, lifting the GMV. A lot of that comes down to structure and process around how we work with our customers. All the way through from how we do lead generation, how we have built a stunt scorecard for scoring the customers and moving them through the pipeline. Through to, you know, closing contracts, integration and so on. We're basically now under his leadership. We're looking to actually now following the same sort of structure that we've had on the enterprise side for Freelancer. We've seen, I mean, a big uptick in activity on the team and an enthusiasm for and so on.
You know, in the quarter, we could have done a lot better there. The thing that we're most disappointed about is Autotrader. On the freight side, we've obviously done a lot of work now merging in various platforms. I'm pleased to say, as you know, we are one platform now. It's now called Loadshift. The Freightlancer name has been retired. Now it's the Freightlancer Enterprise stack. It's live. You can test it for yourself. All loads coming through goes through the platform. In the same way, it goes through the enterprise versions of Freelancer as one code base. Loadshift now benefits from all the updates as we do them on the core platform or for the enterprise customers, which is fantastic.
In the quarter, we had about 8,500 loads go through, which is down 24%. I will say that that is a bit of a misnomer comparing it year-on-year. Particularly because on the old platform with Loadshift, the loads only lasted three days. After three days, every single load was removed from the platform automatically and just rolled off. This was more of a bulletin board. On the new platform, they're up to 30 days. You can't. It's not really apples-to-apples comparison comparing those loads, in terms of the volumes. Since the platforms have merged, we've seen a good uptick in terms of loads being posted, loads being awarded, loads being accepted, and so on.
I'll show that in a second. We've had also a big uptick in the parameters around the loads. The average distance was up 17%. The average freight charge was actually up 40%, although that's driven by fuel and the rising fuel prices. Of course, because we make a commission, that's beneficial for us, 'cause we make a percentage of that. The average load size was actually as a result of that, up 62%. We do think that will come down a little bit. We have seen energy prices around the world skyrocket and pull back a little bit. You know, we'll be banking on more of a sort of a $5,000 average load size. You know, that load size will trend up too.
We, you know, basically successfully merged the platforms. We're now in a position to start extracting a marketplace commission. Now, that has not happened right as yet. Because we've been very gentle with the merger to make sure that we don't upset the supply being the drivers on the platform. We've now got them on the platform. We're now working very gently to pull the jobs onto the platform, because traditionally, phone numbers were just handed out, and the drivers called directly. We still hand the phone numbers out, but we're now starting to pull the bidding activity on the platform. That's happening as we speak. We are seeing a big lift in awarded jobs on the platform, accepted jobs on the platform, et cetera, and so on.
We're gently doing this to make sure that we don't you know cause issues. The site is live. It's pretty much got almost all the features that the old Loadshift site had in terms of filter controls and bookmarking and so forth. There's a lot more functionality that's come through now with the merged platforms. Because it's a marketplace, you've got all the live chat, you've got support, you've got secure payments, you've got all the features we've got on the main platform there. There's a big uplift coming from this. There's about AUD 1 million a day of GMV posted on the platform. In fact, the number's gone up a bit because the freight charges have gone up quite a bit with the fuel charges.
The goal now, and I think the biggest area for growth for the revenue of the company, is converting that GPV of AUD 1 million a day, or gross load value, if you wanna call it, to that 13% commission model. That's really gonna start kicking in from here to the rest of the year and into the first quarter in a big way. Now, with all of that, we've had also a focus on cost reduction. I know that was a comment and a bit of Q&A as of the last quarter. We successfully reduced in the quarter alone costs by AUD 1.2 million. On an annualized basis, that'd be, you know, AUD 4 million or AUD 5 million if that was an annualized basis.
We will be reducing in the third quarter costs by another AUD 1 million. Those cost reduction initiatives actually have been already underway in the last quarter. There's a number of things we've done there. There have been a couple of headcount reductions that we've made. We've done that because, coming out of COVID, there's a lot of people that, you know, literally, you know, work from home. It's not work from home, it's work from Xbox or work from PlayStation or what have you. And they're just not in the cadence that we expect in the business, and we saw pre-COVID. There's been a little bit of headcount reduction.
There's also been a general review of cost control in the business, unnecessary subscriptions and so forth. As you know, obviously on-cost they get reduced, you know, kinda when you make a trimming of those costs as well. We've done a pretty successful job of cost control. AUD 1.2 million in the last quarter, another AUD 1 million further reduction in the fourth quarter. We will be profitable in the next quarter. We'll keep it sustainable there, but we will definitely be profitable in the next quarter. We had negative operating cash flow, AUD 3.2 million for the quarter, and cash capital cash flow was about 2.7%.
What I will do now is I'll open up to the floor for questions and Q&A. Please ask your questions. You may address them to anyone in the room. I may remind you, there's myself in the room. There's Neil Katz, the Chief Financial Officer. There's Sean McMeekin, who's the VP of Sales, who runs the enterprise divisions for both Freightos and Escrow. We've got Adam Byrnes, who's the VP of Product and Growth. You can ask me any questions too. Please, I'll open the floor for questions. Thank you. Alex, how do they ask questions? You maybe
In the chat.
In the chat. If you ask a question. I'm sure it always takes a little bit for someone to ask a question.
I sent it to you in the chat.
Okay. Well, hang on. Maybe just read out the question, and then I'll answer it.
What's the status required for Escrow financial licenses in Europe?
Okay, that's a good question. This has gone on for a long time in the United Kingdom. We have Darren Gravener, who runs the compliance team with a head of compliance at MLRO in London. We submitted earlier in the year back in April, and there was some feedback that came back on that. We had to put in place a wind down plan and this, that, and the other for you know the application, which is something a bit new that we didn't have in full detail. We took the opportunity to put a more robust application in.
15th of November is the date that will be resubmitted. I don't know, Neil, do you wanna maybe make some comments to that?
Well, it's actually the end of November we plan on submitting.
End of November. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah.
15th is the internal deadline.
The internal deadline. They were using two weeks to sort of do internal review. We'll submit it in early December. We expect, because we've had quite a few dealings with the FCA already and we've got a relationship manager, we expect the application to be fast-tracked once it's submitted.
Yeah. I think when they said fast-track, they said it was three months.
Well, it would've been at least three months before.
Yeah.
We get a response.
We think we have fairly robust application going in. It's been a lot of work over quite a number of years actually to get this done. There's a lot of requirements in the U.K. which are over and above what you expect from what you see from the U.S. states. That is going in again in November. From there, the next location is Europe. It's not clear still how, you know, whether how much the U.K. application can passport. Obviously, the U.K. has left the European Union to introduce the passport.
I think there's a lot of work we've done now for Australia, for Canada, for the U.S. . We've got licensing now in all the states bar Nevada. That, I think, is verbally been told we're getting that.
Yeah.
The U.S. is pretty much almost done with the exception of a couple of territories. We've done a lot of work, which should make Europe fairly straightforward for us to put the application in. These things take a lot longer than you expect. By way of comparison, you know, Airbnb went out there with Airbnb Payments and started in 2015, the same thing we did, themselves, and they still don't have the licensing in the U.S. everywhere, right? They're still missing a bunch of different states. It can take five years-seven years to get a license in many jurisdictions. I know it's been a long time, but I think we're at the final end of the road for the U.K. At least it will be Europe.
Thank you.
Brian also asks, "What's the value proposition for the Loadshift user in terms of the commission that we pay?
That's a good question. From the shipper's perspective, it protects them and ensures the load is delivered. The driver turns up, the load is delivered, and the payment is not released until they can inspect the delivery at the other end. Plus, now it's a marketplace model. There's a whole bunch of stuff that we've built in around GPS tracking, you know, delivery documentation. We're gonna make it so that when you start your load, you can take photos and walk around the vehicle with a video camera to make sure all the compliance obligations have been met by the driver. We vet the drivers, which wasn't done in the past. We check their documentation, and there's reviews and there's feedback on the platform. From a shipper's perspective, paying the 3%, which is literally nothing.
In the past, they're used to paying 17.5%-25% with freight forwarders. You know, they get all this benefit, and they get to make sure that the load gets delivered on time before the payment's been released, and there's no issues, right? From the driver's side, they get access to all the jobs, right? There's about $1 million of jobs a day on the site. In the past, the way that's been monetized has been a bit of a Wild West scenario. It's been a $79 a month membership fee, and that's it. If you pay a $79 a month fee, you get all the phone numbers, and then that's it. You're on your own. There's no one to help you. There's no ops team to coordinate.
There's no one to call up the shipper and make sure we've got all the contact details and, you know, everything's, you know, check the weather and check the access, you know, to handle the permitting and the pilots. You know, when we moved the Pride of the Murray, that involved surveying the road from Victoria to Queensland to ensure that the width of the vessel would actually make it through all the power lines, et cetera, and so forth. There had to be some power lines that had to be removed. We had to make sure we go, you know, take certain paths because based on, you know, if there's a bridge in the way and what have you. Pilots had to be organized.
Police escorts had to be organized. Permitting had to be organized. Lobbying had to be organized with actually the electorate office of Gregory to ensure that we got fast track because the weather was kind of on and off, because obviously we had El Niño and so on. There's a lot of benefit on the driver's side and on the shipper side, having experts there to help and track and go forth and load. The other thing is simply AUD 79 a month. That, Pride of the Murray movement was a AUD 300,000 movement, right? You can obviously understand there's a bit of a mispricing there.
For some people who are maybe truck drivers that drive every once a few months and just pick up a job here or there, maybe have some regular work that's contracted and they use this for back loads, maybe the AUD 79 might be too expensive for them because they're not using it for a few months of the year, right? For others, it is way too cheap, and it doesn't represent the value. I mean, a crane movement is about AUD 100,000 and so on. Machinery could be AUD 20,000, right? It's just completely mispriced how it's done in the past, and there's a lot of benefit from the platform and all the support we provide and the management around it. The other thing is that the world's changed.
I mean, in all our businesses, there's a huge amount of regulatory impact that's occurred over the years. Regulation around worker classification, around taxation, and in the freight business, it's chain of responsibility. You know, the world is very different from what it was three, four years ago. Now, you know, there's responsibility all through the chain, and if there's an accident or a load's not tied down properly or this, that, and the other, there's the ramifications are a lot more, a lot higher than they were in the past. You know, both the shipper and the carrier needs the support that we provide in terms of assisting to make sure that everything goes through safety, security, and meets all the compliance standards and so on. There is a lot of value there.
In fact, you know, in all the forums and what have you, the drivers are very happy to pay a lot more money. You know, they just want easy-to-use features and so forth. Some great stuff that's coming through in the future will be if you're a driver looking for a back load and 40% of the trucks on Australia's roads, for example, and this is global as well, are empty, right? We're gonna build a feature in. You hit a button, it basically holds your hand up, and on the map of the world, there'll be a blinking little light with the GPS coordinate saying, "There's a truck available looking for a back load. Here's roughly where I want to pick up.
Here's roughly where it's gonna go. We're gonna reduce, you know, the number of instances where a driver is driving empty on the road. Because when they're driving empty, they're paying for the fuel, but they're not making any money off it. It's the bugbear of all drivers. They're very similar to the Freelancer world. You know, the benefit of Freelancer, the benefit of paying our 10% commission is, A, it's very cheap, that commission, and B, there's jobs. There's jobs. You know, you don't have to spend all your time chasing down the jobs, finding the jobs. We deliver the jobs to you. You put your settings in terms of what you're interested for the loads, and we'll deliver those loads to you.
Our ops team will call you if we think there's a load in the area matching, and we need someone to take something and deliver it straight away. Yeah, there's a lot of benefits there, and the cost is marginal. 3% of the shipper's cycle is nothing. 10% of the driver's side can. In fact, they enter their bid, so they know about that, and they factor it in when they put their bid in, and it's nothing. In the freight world, you know, the pricing is very much random. Freight forwarders charge 7.5%- 10% and so forth, so it's very cost-effective.
The competitive nature of the platform, where the drivers are competing against each other, also drives down the cost a little bit on the shipper side. They know they get a, you know, a great result that's well-managed. Thanks for your question, Ray. Any other questions? Okay, sure.
Great. Ray asks.
Yep.
Escrow eBay update, please.
Yeah. We're live in watches, we're live in motor vehicles. The thing now is to try and get live in other categories. We're trying to go live in Business & Industrial. We're trying to go live in fashion. There's been discussions with eBay Vault, which is the controlled temperature storage facility for things like trading cards and comics. We're trying to go live in sneakers and other forms of collectibles. That's ongoing. There's no update in terms of new categories at this point in time other than a bunch of discussions going on with Manuel and so forth with various different parts of eBay. Any other questions? We are in the process of building out a bunch of sort of marketing collateral for them.
There's a really nice eBay watch video. We're in the process of building a nice eBay motor vehicle video that will go out to their users. A survey's just been done by eBay on the motor vehicles side, asking a whole bunch of different questions and so forth, and educational questions. You know, we expect to be producing a bunch of collateral to go to in each of these categories. Any other questions?
Steve Howell asks.
Yep.
Can you elaborate on your confidence in achieving profitability next quarter? Is the confidence from revenue growth or more due to additional cost cuts?
Yes, from both revenue growth and from cost. Maybe I'll get Neil to add some color to this as well.
Yeah. As Matt said, it's from both. We've done significant cost reductions. On that level we're, you know, we expect that to contribute significantly to getting us to break even and reaching a sustained point of getting to profitability. We're also expecting revenue growth. For Q4, the revenue growth, you know, will be, I guess, moderate. That together with significant cost reductions, which was AUD 1.2 million in Q3 and expect another AUD 1 million in Q4, should reach that point. We are confident we will get there.
Thank you. Any other questions? I will add some color to that. I mean, Neil's comment about growth and revenue being moderate. There's a lot of upside that's a little bit hard to forecast from our side. One thing is a few things I will point out in terms of the revenue growth side that, you know, while hard to forecast could lead to some good things happening. First of all, we have made a major fix in the core marketplace around how milestones work. Also on the bot side and also on the spam side. You know, this way, this whole way in which projects are awarded and milestone, what have you, is a very positive fix.
I think certainly from the A/B test results, I'm happy to walk through anyone who wants to get into the detail there. I think that will lead to really strong retention and growth. In addition, the product's really starting to come together on the core marketplace side. On the collaborative side, we are seeing a lift in average project size and so on. That continues to happen. Deloitte is now integrated, ready to go for the volume. Really it's, you know, there's a bit of work now on activation and this, that and the other, but that could be quite a positive surprise at any time. Same on the computer and printer company.
That's integrated now and rolling out over the next couple of weeks, and they'll be ramping up there. NASA's ramping. The trillion-dollar tech company work, that's a very substantial engagement, a multimillion-dollar engagement, doing effectively what we've done with computer and printer company for customer support, in a global support network. That's a big one. The Loadshift platforms are merged. There's a lot of upside there coming as soon as we can get the commissions starting to really flying up. That's starting now. Like, it's really all the award rates and the exact rates and so forth are starting to really come through, and it's just we've had to be gentle in how we've done it. That will start really kicking through.
There's a huge amount of upside there and be able to generate 13% from some substantial portion of AUD 1 million GMV a day. All of that combined, there's a lot of things happening there in terms of positive upside. It's hard to forecast. The work is done for the majority of that. In terms of the actual technical work, the engineering work, that's done. We're just ready now for the volume. Any other questions? Okay. I'll keep it open for another 10 seconds or 20 seconds if you wanna get a last question in. As always, we're available for a one-on-one if you wanna contact us directly, either matt@freelancer.com or investor@freelancer.com. If there are no other questions, we'll call. There's one more.
Yeah, just one more from Ray.
Yep.
Do you have any thoughts on the Escrow Autotrader issue and expansion?
Yeah. This is my biggest disappointment. Overall, we've built a solution. The solution works in terms of the funnel. We haven't tested it live properly on production, because it went live on 2,500 listings that got pulled down about a week and a half. We never actually saw anything kind of hit our end of the funnel, which is unfortunate. We are taking this with Blinker to other automotive marketplaces. We've had a couple of meetings with them about doing that. Blinker's already approached a bunch of marketplaces. We're gonna start doing that jointly. I don't know, Sean, if you've got any other comments around that at all, but, you know, we have a solution.
The good thing is because it deals with private party financing and most vehicles are financed and we onboarded the finance companies with us directly. You know, we are ready to go with that with other automotive platforms. We will be taking it to them both in partnership with Blinker, and we continue to do the work we're doing with our sales team independently of that. Sean, is there anything else to say on that?
Only that we've got our most experienced partner manager on the team. She's in contact with Blinker and Autotrader on a weekly basis. We'll continue to do so until we can resolve that situation.
Yeah.
Adam asks, "Anything happening with Escrow and real estate in the American market?
Yeah. We've started integrating some construction marketplaces. That's where we're gonna, you know, start moving in to that space. Real estate, there is some work we've got to do in a couple of states around title and this, that, and the other. We can operate today in real estate in the majority of states in the U.S. We completed quite an extensive review with Pillsbury who are our lawyers in New York on this. Right now it's in the construction side that we're gonna start. That's where you'll see the first activity and we'll take that and then we'll kind of build out from there.
After we get the U.K. license filed, and the next two things we're doing in terms of priority are the remainder of the items on the compliance side for real estate and Europe. They're the next two things the compliance team are really trying to knock off on that front. We do get inquiries every week, where people will send us, you know, you know, various documents and so forth trying to get us to close a house out for them and so on. We haven't taken any of that on to date, but we do constantly get queries, and we do have an engagement with Auction.com to take deposits for foreclosed houses to be bought and sold. We've got a bit of work to do still.
You know, we've had discussions for a long time about how that would work. There are some things kind of starting to happen in that space, and that is obviously a massive industry. Any other questions? Okay. Well, thank you for your time today with the third quarter business update. If you'd like to reach out directly to either myself, Neil, or investor@freelancer.com to arrange a one-on-one, please do so. Thank you.