Hello, everyone. Sorry for that. Apparently, we were on mute, so I'll start again. Welcome to the Freelancer Limited first half of 2022 Financial results presentation. My name is Matt Barrie, and I'm the Chief Executive of Freelancer Limited. With me here today, I've got Neil Katz, who's the Chief Financial Officer, Sean McMeekin, who's the Vice President of Sales, and Hector Perez-Nieto, who is the Head of Marketing for the business. As always, you may direct questions to myself or any of the executives in the Q&A, which will happen after the update. Moving into the results, Freelancer Limited delivered a record first half 2022 gross payment volume of AUD 652 million, up 15.2% on PCP or $471 million, up 7.8%.
The Freelancer GMV was AUD 64.7 million, down 4.8% on PCP or $46.6 million, down 11%. Escrow GPV was AUD 564 million, up 18.7% on PCP or AUD 407.2 million, up 11.1%, which is a record first half, all-time record first half GPV for Escrow. The group net revenue was AUD 29.2 million, which is also a record first half result, up 5.1% on PCP, or $20.9 million, down 2.1%. Freelancer revenue was AUD 23.5 million, up 3.4%, or $16.9 million, down 3.6%.
Escrow revenue is 5.7%, up 12.8% on PCP or $4.1, down 4.2%. We had a tailwind of 4.8% on the currency in the period. Approximately 74% of our group revenue is in U.S. dollars, 7% in Australian dollars. We had net operating cash flow of AUD 2.3 million in the first half, and ended with cash and cash equivalents of AUD 31.7 million, which is effectively flat on PCP. Escrow ended the quarter with a big jump in off-balance-sheet cash of 42.6%, up AUD 11.6 million or 38% on the previous corresponding period. Now, the Freelancer group consists of multiple businesses. We're trying to build the Amazon of services.
Some of the largest companies in the worldwide market capitalization are global marketplaces of products. We're trying to build global marketplaces of services. We're in the fields of labor with Freelancer.com, which is the world's largest crowdsourcing marketplace by number of users, 60 million, in about 247 countries, regions, and territories. Escrow.com, which is the world's largest online escrow company. We've done now, as of the Q2 , $6 billion in payment volume that facilitates and is very unique in the field of large value payments. Loadshift, which is Australia's largest online freight marketplace. At some point, we'll take that global. All our market leading broad horizontal service offerings that consumers through the large enterprises require as part of their everyday businesses. On to the other segment.
Freelancer revenue is up a little bit, 3.4% up on PCP, AUD 23.5 million or down 3.6% in U.S. dollars, $16.9 million. The GMV was AUD 64.7 million, down 4.8% on PCP or $46.6 million, down 11%. We've talked about in the previous quarters in terms of the paid marketing. We've got that under control in the first half. We really focused our attention in getting the new predictive modeling for search engine marketing happening. Volume was restored in the first half, and then in the second half, we really focused on optimization and profitability of the campaigns.
We had, you know, an increase in spend in the first half of marketing. I'll talk about a little bit later when I talk about the earnings and so forth. We've also, you know, been focusing on optimization. From here, I think we've got a very solid foundation in terms of the future. I'm glad that we've got this, we've got that under control. We also reached a high of average revenue per user in the channel. Thank you, Hector, for doing some updating of this in the period.
The campaign cost, you can see there, kind of went up in the Q1 and kind of came back down a bit in the Q2 as we really drove through those optimizations with the new predictive modeling and basically Hector's management of the campaigns. Also we've got some pretty good technical results on the search engine optimization in terms of customer acquisition. If you go into Google Search Console, all the numbers are trending in the right direction. We're, you know, with the impressions, you can see here that a fairly strong growth in terms of organic traffic in the quarter. You know, in terms of those particular channels, in terms of customer acquisition, we got some decent results.
We are now in the Q2 , really focusing on getting engineering resources to work on the next stage, really user-generated content. A lot of work we're doing around Give-Get, which is a paid acquisition channel where you know if a user refers another user, you kind of pay them $20 and then the referrer and the referee both get paid. That's kind of like the one true channel that a lot of major internet companies use to grow. Effectively on the marketing side, Hector's been doing a good job in terms of getting that all under control and well managed.
On the supply side, the marketplace added 1.5 million users in the Q2 for a total of 3.1 million over the first half. Liquidity also has been increasing with the percentage of projects receiving their first bid in thirty seconds increasing up to 49% as of the writing of this report. Our average project size increased as well, up 12% PCP to $241. You know, I think this is partially from moving the targeting for the paid acquisition to higher value customers. Also, you know, there's been a long-term trend just generally in terms of that number. It's unfortunate that it hasn't shown up in Google here.
I don't know what's going on, but it is in the report that's on the ASX. In terms of product engineering, the three big focuses I've talked about from the beginning of the year continue to remain for the rest of the year, visual enhancements to the UI, UX, enhancements to payments, enterprise features, Mac, maybe accountable collaboration, and a lot of work is going on in the core funnel and improvements that we you know I think we'll deliver on in the second half of this year.
Also trust and safety, as well. We also launched a couple of new products in the marketplace, Quotations, which is the ability for a freelancer directly to send an offering to a particular client for payment, effectively a quotation, just as it works in the real world. This is an improvement and an addition to the current marketplace model where people post projects, and people bid on them and so forth. Freelancers can now send quotations to anyone in the marketplace for follow-on work or new work and so forth, and we'll be expanding the ways in which that can happen.
It also provides a better way for handling payments, an improved way of handling payments because under the project model, basically when you post a project and people bid on it, and you award the project, it's really up to the client to set up the series of payments or milestone payments. That can be a bit troubling for a new user. While the freelancers are very experienced in terms of the nature of the payment, of payments they want to receive, the format in which they want to receive them, and so forth. This is an additional capability for freelancers to receive work and we launched that at the beginning of this year, and we continue to improve on.
We also talked in the past about wanting to improve the performance of upgrades. We've been doing that. There's some good performance here in terms of revenue from upgrades. You can see here in the first half of this year, that we've got a kind of bit of a lift in that as we've got improved the visibility and so forth. You know, the ratio of projects that are upgraded has gone from about 2.5% to about 5.5%. That's also an improvement. We've also been working on the functionality of the messaging system and made a number of improvements there. Not sure why these images are not coming through.
In terms of task lists, you know, this is a great collaborative feature, so that freelancers and clients can basically load into the system basically a backlog of both feature requests, bug fixes and potential items of work they wanna work on in the future. You know, the great thing about backlogs is from a business perspective, is that backlogs continue to grow kind of forever. Anyone who's been a product manager or an engineering team lead will know that it really captures all the things you wanna do and all the improvements you wanna make and any fixes you wanna make to the particular to the product over time.
There's been quite a number of things happening in that front, and we expect that to be paying off. You will see that reflected, I believe, in the future in an improvement in the average project size. You'll see that lift up. At the moment, $241 is a reasonable amount to be extracting in terms of work between two people. If you're in the Western economy and you have someone working for you, either in the U.S., U.K., Canada, or Australia, they're a full-time member, that particular person will probably cost you at least $45,000 a year.
$241 is a tiny amount of work, and we believe we can add a zero to that through improvements in collaborative tools and human- computer interaction and improved use of video. There's a bunch of video-related features that are currently live on the site, including right now, you can leave a bid and also leave a video on your bid. That's been live for the past five days. That's showing a great uplift in terms of interactivity and engagement from people, as well as building that trust and empathy between clients and employers. We also built some functionality to improve the way that our freelancers can be notified about projects with alerts.
There's been a big improvement in terms of the UX and so forth, which I believe also will lead to big improvements to the engagement over time with the product. I'm not sure why this is not loading for me in these images, but I'll see if I can reload it and get improvements for this other screen. Otherwise, I might switch the slide deck if it doesn't load up. Okay. There's a lot of improvements in the collaborative tools. There's some improvements in the upgrade lines, and we think there's gonna be a lot of improvement coming in the second half of this year in terms of the core marketplace.
There has been a drag for the last number of years in the performance of the core marketplace. I'm pleased to say that in the first half of this year, we think we've got a very good handle on what the key issues have been in that. We've started to improve quite a number of things in the core marketplace for fixed price non-hiring projects. We think in the second half of this year, we're gonna start to see the fruits of that. I can talk about that a little bit later when we get to the Q&A if anyone's interested. I'm sure some people have questions on that. I'll just switch to the slide deck.
For some reason, the Google Docs is not behaving very, very well in terms of performance there. In terms of Escrow.com segment, we had a record first half for that business. The business was also profitable in the first half. We had a positive EBITDA of AUD 0.7 million. That business, in addition to doing well over AUD 1 billion a year in volume in Australian dollars, to doing $1 billion a year in volume for US dollars, we also earned a small profit. That business is in a very, very good shape in terms of potential future growth.
There's a lot of upside I think that's gonna come in the automotive space. We went live a week ago with Autotrader and Blinker in the U.S. For the very, very first time, you can go to your mobile phone, you can browse the marketplace of cars that Autotrader has for offer. You can select a car, make an offer on the car, you can negotiate a price. You can apply for financing from a marketplace of financiers, get offers from those financiers so it's competitive. No longer are you stuck at a dealer where there's only one provider, and you're kind of getting really you know rorted because that's where dealers make all their money. You get a marketplace of offers.
You can make a down payment which goes into Escrow.com, which allows you to lower the costs. You can get your offer accepted. You can do trade. You can then do the title transfer, the insurance, everything through the app and finally get the car delivered. This is really for the very, very first time you can effectively get all of that done at the same time. What's going on with Google here? Through just your app, which is amazing. We do think that we're gonna tip the entire automotive sector over time. It will take a couple of years, but we've obviously got a strong foothold with eBay Motors. We've got Autotrader U.S. now.
We've closed and signed AutoTrader.ca, and we have in development and ready, hopefully in the second half of this year, to go out for the AutoTrader.ca. We made some improvements to the availability of Canadian dollars also in the first half for Escrow.com, which will facilitate AutoTrader.ca to go live. It's now available through the API as well as through just the normal transaction funnel as a consumer. We also enabled some improvements around vendor financing for domain names for Escrow.com. We also integrated quite a number of new marketplaces, including quite a number of M&A marketplaces. Together with the automotive space, we believe the M&A space, we're having some solid traction.
Historically, we allowed the buying and selling of virtual stores on Escrow. For example, with Shopify, you can buy and sell. We're the only payment method for Shopify Exchange. We're in Flippa for buying and selling websites and apps. We are also now in MicroAcquire, which is a hot tech company in Silicon Valley for buying and selling whole startups. We also went into a number of other M&A traditional, more traditional M&A businesses over the period. In terms of, I mentioned some wholesale marketplaces, agricultural products, jewelry, and wholesale electronics. In the first half, in luxury watches, we added both WatchReport and Timecraft. We also added in the services space a cybersecurity firm.
We also had Dr. Bing Rong joined us in the first half. He's a professor, former professor and T.J. Watson Scholar from IBM in engineering, and he's in charge of the product and engineering. There's a great team there in terms of the talent. Now, I'd like just to come back to the Freelancer enterprise narrative. Sorry, I apologize, but for some reason, Google Docs is having a bit of an issue in displaying my materials, so I'll just kind of. Hopefully, everyone's got access to the ASX feed, and they can kind of just go through the commentary or go to the presentation in their own time. I'm not sure what's going on here. There's quite a number of big wins that happened over the first half.
Certainly there's a lot of growth opportunity now presented to us in the second half for enterprise. The GPV for enterprise was up 163% in U.S. dollars in the first half versus PCP. That now represents about 5.5% of GMV in the marketplace. So that's growing very strongly. In terms of some key items, Deloitte MyGigs, which we've talked about for some time, we've been working on with Deloitte since about 2018. That is imminently turning on for external and for their consultants. They're gonna start in week one, and I believe that could even be today or tomorrow. It's literally days away.
30 select internal consultants will have access to everything, and they're going through intensive training and marketing with them. It's an onboarding of them. The next week, 1,000 consultants will go live. The week after that, another 1,000 consultants will go live. The week after that, they'll open up to 38,000 consultants, which is the total number that currently have accounts on MyGigs for internal and external. The initial focus of the training will be on internal, but the external will be available. From there's 50,000 in the initial target group. An additional 12,000 roughly will be added post that 38,000 being onboarded.
They've also said that 30,000 more will be joining, taking the total to 80,000, with the inclusion of a select number of consultants from India. That is imminently going live. You know, it's difficult to forecast the impact of that, but it's been the culmination of really about four years of work. We're very excited about that. It's been, you know, a lot of, you know, work from the team to really get it down to the final yards in the last couple of weeks. That is literally in the next few days going live. Hopefully, we'll be able to get out something to the ASX feed on that when that does go live, just to kind of let everyone know.
That's a big one. Another big one is, there's a global computer and printer company that everyone probably on this call would have a product in their house or their business somewhere, where we've been reconfiguring how they do field services, so that when you log a call or you go and go to their website and you log a support ticket 'cause you've broken your computer or you've broken your printer. Instead of a badged or employed technician, field services technician going out and actually repairing your computer, what actually happens is that a freelancer will go out and repair the equipment. That has been very successful. We have been live in India for some time.
We've just expanded to the fifth city, and three more cities are underway. There's about 70 or so, roughly, field services personnel that are working in the greater network repairing computers and printers. In Indonesia, we expanded to three more cities, Serang, Balikpapan, and Bogor in the Q2 . In Australia, we've expanded to five cities now that are live and active. We also just signed last week a scope of work to expand to. That's working now, so I'll load up the Zoom and share my screen again. So we just expanded. We're expanding to Brisbane as of last week. That's on the scope of work.
Beyond that, we've also signed New Zealand, so that will be going live in the second half of this year. Malaysia, we're doing the negotiation for the scope of work to expand to Malaysia. By the end of the year, we'll be in five countries in terms of that work. We are also in a paid engineering services integration right now. It's about $200,000 worth of work to integrate our systems into their systems. Job work orders go in directly and get directly injected into their system. That will now enable a big scale-up of the volume, right? You know, India alone has 660,000 work orders a year. We're currently doing about 1,000 a month.
The integration will allow us to, you know, add a zero to that number and really start scaling from there. That's happening now. The engineering work will finish in August of this year, and then the scale-up will happen in the second half. We've got a couple of sort of internal forecasts on that, but the numbers should be going, you know, from the thousands per month to the tens of thousands a month to more over the second half. As part of that, there's a pretty neat sort of interface that we've kinda built in terms of how that's just gonna visually look for the field technicians and also for the operators.
The other things that have happened in the enterprise division is obviously the NOIS2, which is the Open Innovation Services 2 contract with NASA for, h ere are some pictures of Deloitte, by the way, and kind of what it looks like. There's been quite a bit of QA that's gone through this product and particularly in the last number of months. It's a beautiful looking product. In terms of NASA, we've obviously got this $25 million open innovation contract that we signed in 2020. That scaled up end of November of last year in terms of the announced funding to $175 million . There were 19 joint winners originally of the contract out of the $25 million.
We got about, o f the AUD 25 million, about AUD 13 million has been awarded. We got about AUD 4.3 million of that, as the largest company that was part of that tender. That is now just starting to scale up to the AUD 175 million. In fact, even this morning, there were two or three task orders that were sent through. We expect from here on in we will get both an increase in frequency of task orders as well as increase in size of task orders. We're starting to see that. The complexity of the work and the value of the work is going up.
Right now, live, we've got our biggest challenge yet, which is a $1 million prize purse for designing of a next generation incident response dashboard for emergency services personnel to be able to respond if there's a bombing or an earthquake or what have you. At the moment, it's very, very pen- and- paper oriented. That's currently live. You can go to our website and you can enter that if you wish. You know, I just wanna.
One thing I want to point out here is that while traditionally our marketplace has really been focused on mass market, small value jobs, and that's kind of the history from, you know, 13 years ago is, you know, $200 job cost $241 today, and, you know, for consumers and small businesses. You know, we are really the only place in the world you can get super high-end work done from very high-end freelancers in very sophisticated areas. For example, this is a complete innovation challenge that happened in the first half of this year, which is a $400,000 prize purse for finding insights through data science in child morbidity.
This was run by the National Institutes of Health because NASA's now acted as a gateway for the whole of U.S. government, and we're also finding ways now to go directly to these government departments and so forth, and institutions, and kind of you know and really expand on the relationships we've built under the NOIS2 program that go direct. You know in this particular case, if you look at the quality of the work, it's you know running effectively academic quality publishable research papers on finding data insights for $400,000 prize money. The you know winners included teams such as Columbia University, the IBM Data Science and AI Elite Team in San Francisco, University of Washington, Seattle, and so forth.
You know, the quality of the entries, you know. Structural equation modeling identifies causal pathways between social determinants of paternal health, biomarkers of allostatic load, and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy among racial groups. If anyone's used any other freelance marketplaces, I'd be very interested to know which ones you can go to and which button you can click on to find, you know, the IBM AI team, and University of Washington submitting this level of quality of work in very sophisticated areas at these sort of dollar values. It's really quite incredible what we're doing there. In terms of other things that are happening in the enterprise division, InSource, which is our generalized version of MyGigs, is under development.
This is basically the ability for us to go to any other Fortune 500 or equivalent global sort of client and deploy for them infrastructure for not just hiring talent in the cloud, but also working together. If you click the left-hand button when you post a job, you can hire someone else in your organization to do the work for you. For example, if you think back to the Deloitte example, someone in the New York office can hire someone in South Africa, someone in London can maybe team up and work with someone in Los Angeles. You know, people from all around the world can kind of collaborate together, and it's a way to improve workforce efficiency, particularly in large enterprise.
They've got lots of people around the world and, you know, provide opportunity and access to new jobs that they might not be available in the local area because the industries they're supported, might not be, you know, might be very narrow. For example, in Australia, it might be limited to mining and service type companies. If you kind of join from MyGigs from Australia, you might be able to access, you know, media or technology jobs in the West Coast of the U.S., that otherwise aren't available to you. If you think about going to Coca-Cola, going to Ford, going to what have you know, this is a way that they can unlock talent within your organization, find skills you didn't know you had.
By the way, access Freelancer's largest marketplace in the world of talent, 60 million people to get jobs done at very efficient rates. It's a pretty amazing thing, and I think it's really gonna drive adoption. That's also being worked on and, you know, we plan on getting that out the door in the second half at some point. We've already been demoing to some of the largest companies in the world. We've got some great feedback and so forth. That's underway. We also awarded a number of other task orders for NASA, I just mentioned. You know, again, pointing to the complexity of the work, one was on shock propagation in satellites.
Really, you can come to Freelancer for simple work, and you come to Freelancer for very sophisticated work as well and get very high-quality talent. By the way, all these innovation contests, that's the one way you can build your talent pool. It's a way in which, you know, you have all the entrants into, for example, this NIST challenge. They're providing solutions for an incident response dashboard that can be put into a talent network now, and you can tap into that then to get a range of things done now that you know the quality of their work because they've made a submission for that particular contest. It really is an incredible network of talent and liquidity.
In terms of other things that are happening in enterprise, you can see from the GPV growth, 163% year-on-year. There's a lot. Maybe Sean, I can turn over to you. Maybe you can mention some of the other names we've been working with enterprise and kind of what's happening on that front.
Yeah, sure, Matt. As Matt mentioned, the growth in GMV, but also reflected in the revenue. The revenue's up 199% as well, PCP. It's brands that we've signed agreements with in the past. It's more brands that are coming that we're in contact with at the moment. There's strong growth. For example, Yara International, global chemical company out of Europe, utilizing us out of Berlin, Oslo, and Singapore. We've got Adobe out of the U.S., and we've got a couple of the largest BPO companies in India, for example, Mphasis and Tata. The sales splits from the team has been going on for the first half of the year and will continue.
The borders opening up will allow us to go and see more clients in person, which will also help our conversion rates. We're confident that, yeah, there's certainly upside with all of this activity in the market, and we predict that this upward trend in GMV will continue over the long term.
Thanks, Sean. Okay, I want to show you a few more images, and I apologize before. For some reason my laptop was breaking the images when I was trying to load them up. You know, this is a picture of the Autotrader and Blinker integration. It's pretty neat that you can, you know, from your phone, you know, browse a marketplace of cars, select a car, purchase the car, finance the car, complete the transaction, and you can just go about your everyday life. You don't have to sit at a dealer for six hours while they do paperwork and be captive. So that's pretty revolutionary. I will now skip through to the freight division before we go to Q&A, and I'll just kind of show you some of the things we're doing there.
There's gonna be a lot of upside in this in the second half. In terms of the freight group, we've obviously got at the moment, Freightlancer, which is Freelancer for freight that's just built on an enterprise stack. It's the same stack that Deloitte MyGigs is built on and so forth. Effectively, you know, procuring a service is done very similarly or, you know, no matter what industry you're in. In the generalized form of Freelancer, you post your job, people bid on it, you award it, they accept it. You pay a commission of 3% as a buyer of services and 10% as a seller of services. It's no different from the freight side.
You post your load, drivers around the world and carriers, you know, carriers around the world will bid on that. You award it, they accept it. We charge the freight owner 3%, we charge the carrier 10%. We've been operating Freightlancer for some time. Over the course of the last 12 months, we got onto the enterprise stack. Any improvements to the Freightlancer code base happens now directly with the freight division. The other thing is we did in the last 12 months is that almost a year ago today, we bought Loadshift. Loadshift is the largest freight bulletin board in the country.
It's we bought that in partnership with Wes Maas, who's the founder and CEO of Maas Group, which is you know a multi-billion dollar listed diversified construction and industrials company. That business is pretty phenomenal because that has a lot of distribution for freight. Unfortunately for the old Loadshift business, it wasn't monetized very well. When we bought it was doing AUD 1.057 million in revenue. Even though there was hundreds of millions of dollars of freight being posted on it, because the model there in terms of business model was a driver could pay $79 a month and get access to all the phone numbers of all the freight owners.
One movement, for example, move a crane somewhere, that could be a AUD 100,000 movement. For AUD 79, someone could do that for free, with no further payment other than the membership fee. Obviously, that's a very poorly monetized business. The big thing is that in middle of August of this year, coming up in about two weeks, Loadshift and Freightlancer will be merged into one model, and it's gonna be a commission model. The commissions are exactly the same as Freelancer, 3%. Then Freightlancer, 3% on the freight owner side and 10% on the carrier side. There's quite a lot of monetization there.
If you look at the graphs in front of you, in terms of the load volume, that's been increasing quite strongly over a period of time. It's about a decade of history there. In the Q2 , we did a little bit over 20,000 loads. It's about 83,000 loads last year that were done through the site. Each load is about 1,400 kilometers, and they're about AUD 3 a kilometer at this point in time. Each load is about AUD 4,400, comparing to an average project size on Freelancer of $241. The liquidity has built up quite well. It's about 4.7 bids per load now.
In the quarter, we also did about 29 million kilometers of freight. Last year, we did about 120 million or so kilometers of freight. That represents notionally around AUD 350 million per annum. On a forward basis from today, there'll be probably about AUD 380 million notional million dollars worth of freight posted in the freight division, and we'll be able to start monetizing that at 13%. 13% of AUD 380 million is AUD 49 million. You can make some assumption there in terms of, you know, what percentage of that freight will move. You know, I think, you know, you make assumption at least half that will move.
It's probably an AUD 25 million revenue opportunity for us to monetize, which is gonna start happening as of two weeks from now. I think the ability for this to really start generating a lot of revenue quite quickly is there. It's really, we don't have to have a sales team go chase loads, although they're executing very, very well, and I'll show you an example of what they've done in the last half. We've got loads just there, and we just need to convert them. Of course, we're providing a much higher quality, more value-added service in return for that commission because before it was the Wild West. You simply post your load, and a bunch of drivers will call you up, and you don't know who they are.
Whether they're not vetted, they're not reviewed, there's no feedback on their accounts. You don't know who these people are. After you've picked someone, they stick, you know, they still keep calling you because there's no notification to any of the other drivers, the load's already moved. It's quite a very basic old school experience. The new model is just like Freelancer. It's a much better experience for the carriers. They know if a load's been awarded. They don't have to waste their time calling someone. You know, they the whole thing is managed. There's operators who basically act as both recruiters and in some cases, project managers, like copilots on the load. It's, you know, the drivers are vetted. We check their IDs, which didn't happen in the past. We check their certificate of currency.
We check their licenses. We get feedback, reviews, and so forth. It's a much better model for both the carriers and for freight owners. There's great value in the 13% model. There's a lot of uptick there that will start to happen as of August of this year. It's really down to the team to execute to see just how much of that we can extract. I do expect a big uplift there, and that's gonna be a big driver in terms of the top-line revenue number. I just wanna show you an example of what we've actually managed to bring in and do. You know, we have quite a bit of expertise in the team.
You know, in the first half, and in fact, this is the Macquarie Mail on the 28 May 2022. We did the largest marine movement by land in history in the Southern Hemisphere. We moved the Pride of the Murray from Victoria to Queensland. It was about 1,750 kilometers with a 192-ton payload. That is actually quite a significant movement in terms of the expertise. It just shows what we do. We're not. It's not like a little tech company where you're posting parcels on the site, and parcels are moving back and forwards. We can move quite sophisticated things. You know, this is the largest over land marine transport operation ever attempted in Australian history.
We're really in this business, you know, Freelancer, Escrow, and on the freight side, we're doing a lot of stuff. You know, we're working with NASA, working with Deloitte. We're working with, you know, moving paddle steamers across the country. We're enabling payments in AutoTrader. We're really at the breadth and the scale of what we do here is huge. We've only really scratched the surface in terms of what we're doing in each of these industries. There's a lot of upside to come. I think before we just go to Q&A, I just wanna point out to everyone just where I think the upside will be in the second half of this year. There's quite a lot of things.
I just wanna kinda go through this before we turn it over for your questions. In the second half of this year, Deloitte's going live. I've talked about that. Initially , if you ramp- up 30 consultants to 1,000 consultants, 2,000 consultants, 38,000 consultants, 50,000 consultants, 80,000 consultants, that's finally happening. I know it's been a long time coming, but it's finally here. Big upside there. We've got the ramp- up that's happening today in three countries with a computer and printer company. That's expanding in jobs. That's India, Australia, and Indonesia. We're going live in the second half in New Zealand. We'll go live in Malaysia. It'll be five countries.
The integration will be complete end of August, which will allow a big scale up in terms of the jobs going through there, the automation. You know, we know the numbers. We've been given various numbers in terms of what the GDP opportunity is for the whole of the repair space globally. Depending on kind of what jobs are enabled and not enabled, depending on the countries, you know, there's commercial and there's consumer. Then there's certain product ranges that we're doing repairs on and certain product ranges we're not doing repairs on. You know, across 13 countries, which is the, what, you know, roughly the number that they're talking with us in terms of the initial kind of focus. We believe Europe will be the next countries.
There'll be a couple of countries in Europe we'll probably go live in after those first five. You know, the GDP there, I wanna couch this. I mean, this is a forecast, and this is not firm. There's nothing contractually signed about the actual volumes. And there's a lot of work we have to do in terms of the ramp- up there. You know, if you add up the volume of repairs in those countries, the 13 countries, you know, somewhere between AUD 50 million and AUD 150 million of GDP. There's a lot of stuff there, right? For us to kinda, you know, really try and it's down to us to execute and really go from, you know, at the moment, we're at 1,000 jobs a month.
If over 1,000 jobs a month, count of jobs, 1,000 jobs a month. The focus is to go from 1,000 to 10,000 jobs a month, to 20,000, 50,000, and really just try and boost that up. There will be a lot of work, but there's a big opportunity, and that's why I keep wanting to bring this up, and the automation will enable it from the end of August. There's the big ramp-up at NASA. In the first $25 million, we estimate roughly about $13 million has been awarded. We've got about $4.3 million of that. There's still about $12 million of that first $25 million. There's now $175 million. It has gone from 19 tenderers to 31 tenderers.
We're still the biggest, pretty much, in that group. We do think we'll get quite a number. We've got a strategy of partnering with a lot of the other smaller firms because a lot of them are really small businesses or just family-run businesses. We've been quite successful in winning. We've been winning about two out of three task orders that we've been bidding on recently. There's a very professional government procurement team we've built out of Vancouver now that's very professional at writing these government tender applications or proposals. You know, we think there'll be a lot of upside from NASA in the next twelve months. We're starting to see the frequency and the value of these task orders.
They wouldn't increase the value of the program, the funding of the program 600% unless things were going right. You can certainly see from the stuff we've awarded so far, it's done really well. In terms of Escrow, Autotrader is live. That's starting to ramp- up. We're gonna be ultimately on all private party listings with Autotrader. We're rolling out through California as we speak, so there's some upside there. This is a new thing, obviously. They've never had payments before. You'd be surprised to know that most classified sites in the world are exactly that, classified sites. They don't know if the car is sold or not because the listing doesn't get renewed. They don't know who bought the car. They know very little.
In many circumstances, they'll just hand out phone numbers, and they have no clue who's bought the car. They'll follow up with surveys and so forth, but they don't really know. There's a lot of things you can do once you collect the payments, right? You can increase your liquidity 'cause it's easier to sell the car across border. That happens a lot in the U.S. You can interstate sales. You can collect feedback on the buyer and the sellers to know if they're reputable. You can upsell. You can sell snow tires. You can sell financing. You can sell a range of things.
We are going to start offering shortly financing through Escrow, not just in automotive, but there are other asset classes where we are, I think, very close to making an announcement where we provide financing. There's a big opportunity in freight, as I said just a second ago, monetizing that AUD 80 million worth of freight opportunity at 13%. We don't know how much we're gonna be able to monetize, but we're very bullish in terms of what we think we can do internally on that. As I said before, there's about AUD 49 million a year including everything. If you make an assumption only half the stuff moves, there's maybe AUD 25 million-dollar revenue opportunity. That should spit out cash pretty quickly, right?
There's been a drag on the core marketplace, you know, for some time. We think we've got a fairly good idea what it is. We've started rectifying it. It's been a multi-year thing. It's been a bit of an insidious issue that's kinda crept in. That's been a little bit hard for us to diagnose. I think we now have a good handle on what it is. We have a war room that we've created where week by week we're kinda working through that. There's I think a big improvement that's gonna turn around in the core marketplace.
I know there's been a few questions from investors over that, in the past calls. There's quite a lot of collaborative tools and features. You know, talking about task-based quotes. There's you know a great use of video and easier ability to sell service and so forth. There's a lot of good things that are happening in the core commercial consumer marketplace as well. There's a lot of upside from here. Without further ado, what I will do is I'll just turn it over to Q&A. You can ask a question. As I said at the beginning, you can address it to myself or any of the other executives we have here. Just to reiterate, I've got Neil Katz, the Chief Financial Officer.
I've got Sean McMeekin, who's the VP of Sales. I've got Hector Perez-Nieto on the call, who's in charge of marketing. I actually also have Andrew Bateman driving the laptop from engineering, if you wanna ask him a question. We'll open it up now.
Jackson.
Jackson's on the call as well from Escrow. Okay. I'll open up now for Q&A. Please send in your questions, and we'll get Andrew to triage them and read them out. Over to you. Any questions? Don't be afraid. Let me check the chat. Okay. Ray to everyone. Can you comment on how Freelancer is performing relative to its competitors? Is the pie growing or? Look, the space in it is in its very early days. If you look at how many users we've got on our website, 60 million registered users, and we're the largest. Our closest competitors are in the millions of users.
I haven't checked their actual user counts, but you know, one of them, one of our closest competitors got to 20 million users, and they made the decision that they wanted to really focus on sort of high-end jobs and U.S. jobs. They kinda went from 20 million to two million. I don't know where they are now. Maybe they're back up to 10 million, maybe they're back up to 20 million. But certainly wouldn't be in the 100 million dollar, 100 million user range. Another competitor of ours, which is a big one in the U.S. listed, last time I looked, online it said 830,000 service providers. If you know, you can make an assumption maybe they've added 10x since then, maybe it's eight million.
I don't know, but it certainly wouldn't be 100 million service providers. A bunch of the freelancers are kinda have accounts on multiple sites. If you add up the total number of, you know, online workers, globally on all the sites, I think you would struggle to be more than 100 million users. Now, if you think about who could make use of freelance services, there's about five billion people on the internet. Five billion people also, in the world are on $30 a day or less, so need a better job. If you're not part of that five billion that need a better job, you probably need somebody to help you as part of your everyday life, whether it's at a consumer level or the big or the high level.
First comment I just wanna say is that the whole space is gigantic and the pie will be growing dramatically over the next number of years. It is a lot more complex to deliver a service than a product. A product is very simple. I would sell a book. The book is not sentient. You get the book, you know, it has. The pages are all there. You know, the quality of the book, you know, it's people don't really counterfeit books that often. You know exactly what it is, what you're getting. When you have a service, it's a very dynamic thing. You know, that everyone has a profit motive. Everyone's trying to maximize their profit objectives.
You change a rule or make a change in the marketplace, you get all sorts of weird things that happen in terms of unintended consequences. Yeah, in all honesty, I think we've lagged a bit in terms of our share of the pie. A lot of that has been in the core consumer marketplace. You know, I talked about you know some of the own goals we've kicked in terms of product. I think we've on top of now what has been a core issue in fixed price desktop projects, which has been something that has been a bit of a Moby Dick for us for some time.
You know, we think we are well on top of what the issues are, and now we have a plan to solve them. I wanna turn that around. We did have very strong revenue growth in the core consumer marketplace in the early days. We're at 50.0% compound average revenue growth in the very early days before that triple digit movement off a low base. I think we have some work to do there, Ray, in terms of, you know, really turning things around. I will say one thing, we have done a lot of this business on very little operating capital, right? You know, we started off, and we raised AUD 1.5 million to buy a marketplace back in 2009.
We didn't raise a single cent of operating capital, and we just focused on revenue growth. We focused on execution. We did execute very well back then. We took it public, and the ASX, we had a very successful IPO on the day. We were the first company to go public in the space. We're the first company to reach AUD 1 billion market capitalization, although it's dropped back a bit now. It's actually quite ridiculous with valuations right now. You know, I have very much the confidence that we can execute and get things back again to that sort of level of growth. I really do think we've got a good handle now on what's going on.
We've got tremendous performance outside of that in the Enterprise Division, which is in the triple-digit range. We've got some great performance, as we've shown, with the Escrow Division over the last 18 months. The Freight Division is gonna blow the socks off everyone. I think there's really gonna be a big uplift in revenue there that I think is being attributed with zero value by investors in the market right now. In fact, I think there's probably zero value on quite a number of parts of the business right now, where the share price is. I think we just need to execute, demonstrate that, and I think we're on the cusp of doing that across multiple parts of the business.
In terms of the core consumer marketplace, we've got some work to do. We think we know what the issues are, and we just wanna work on it, right? The only thing that will, you know, generate ultimately positive result in the market is execution and delivery of financials, right? All that matters in my opinion, it's revenue. That's all that matters. I think we're really close to getting there. James, you've noted that escrow is profitable on an EBITDA basis. How much further investments are required to scale the business? Or would you expect to be consistently profitable at this point? Great question. I wanna run all businesses at profitability, EBITDA profitability, right? All of them.
The freight business, I will note, as of July, will be cash flow positive. So that division will be cash flow positive. I do wanna get to a profitable, a fully profitable basis across the entire group and keep it profitable. Over the years, we've kind of skirted in and out. Some months have been profitable, some months have been not profitable, and I've reported, you know, maybe this month Escrow has been, maybe that month Freelancer has been. I do wanna get to this point to profitable and permanently profitable and again, try to reinvest everything into growth, but keep a profit and build a sustained profit over time, a small sustained profit, and keep that growing, right?
Now, I will note that we have very little in the way of CapEx in this business, almost zero CapEx in this business. It's all OpEx, and the OpEx basically goes into headcount, marketing, and rent. Now, in the first half, I will mention just on the EBITDA basis, you know, we had negative AUD 4 million in EBITDA in the first half. That was due to a 30% increase in marketing as we kind of, you know, really tried to get that model executing. We did pare that back by the end of the Q2 . So the marketing costs are now on a monthly basis, approximately what they were in the first half of 2021.
There was a big boost that happened 'cause we're really trying to get Google to respond to us. We've talked about this in previous quarters. We've got it responding. We've got Hector on the program, and we've now got a very good handle kind of operationally kind of where that is. We have trimmed that back, so the marketing costs have come back. We've also on the headcount costs, we did build out the headcount a little bit in anticipation of big revenue growth. That revenue growth, a tiny little bit of revenue growth in the first half, but it was a little bit premature. We kind of wound the whole lot back in certain areas.
We're about halfway back between where we were in the first half numbers for this year and the first half numbers of 2021, kind of halfway back in terms of winding back. There's also been a bit of cost inflation in tech that's happened over, particularly over the last 18 months. You know, the tech market's been a bit crazy, engineers and so forth. I think there's a bit of reality of that is creeping in now, because of what's been happening in the U.S. and so forth and in crypto and so on. To answer your question. Look, it's really how long is a piece of string in terms of what we wanna invest into the escrow business.
There's been quite a number of discussions with various investors that potentially wanna make an investment into the escrow business. There's actually been some term sheets written and so forth. We haven't taken any of them. We're not imminently gonna take any of them. There is some functionality, as I've mentioned before, that has opened up in terms of our ability to take money into that business. It's obviously quite a unique asset. There's a lot of innovation that's happening in payments. Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Facebook Pay, PayPal, Venmo, Afterpay, Zelle. It's all in the low-value transaction size. Apple Pay's average transaction size is $23. PayPal is at $60-$64. Venmo is about the same.
Credit cards are at $57, unless you go to Amex, which is about double. Afterpay is $108 roughly. It's all in that low-end transaction size. All that red ocean, where they're all fighting it out, you know, Samsung versus Apple versus Google versus whatever, PayPal versus Afterpay. They're all built on cards. They're all either built on a credit card or they're built on a debit card, those digital wallets. That entire space by value is only 3% of U.S. card volume. The whole of U.S. card volume by value is only 8% of U.S. domestic payments. That, all that stuff you see in the news about PayPal, Afterpay, that's 3% of 8% by value of the entire U.S. market. Now, we effectively have a very, very strong regulatory position.
I mean, almost even a regulatory monopoly in the way they've created it in terms of, you know, large value payments to online escrow. I mean, simply no one else has registered, or managed to obtain a multi-jurisdictional, online escrow, footprint like we have, outside of real estate. We're in terms of large value payments, you know, AUD 10,000, AUD 100,000, AUD 1 million, AUD 10 million, we've really got a blue ocean in front of us. What we need to do here to execute from here is two things. One is we've got to build out the sales organization, right? Which is basically going to a series of verticals, and I've got them listed here, which I'll just show you.
We've got some good footholds in these verticals. We've got. Now, the verticals are basically, it's here. It's, you know, we've got a good presence in online. Talked about that before, where everyone's really brought their domain names to us, whether it's Twitter or Uber or SpaceX or what have you. We're building out, we've got building strong footholds in automotive, strong footholds in M&A. Really these segments which go up logarithmically in terms of the size. So ultimately, real estate in the U.S. is a $10 trillion a year market domestically. We really just need to go out there and just transform these platforms and merchants that sell these assets from no payments for the most part to payments. You know, you can't go to Zillow and pay for a house.
You can't go to virtually all the marketplaces in the world for cars and pay for a car, right? We're transforming these platforms from no payments to payments, right? At the very low end, yes, you do compete with credit cards and everything else when you have low-end watches, for example. But the high-end watches, $50,000, $100,000, $150,000. If you go to Amazon.com right now today, and you go type in watches, and then you apply the filters in Amazon, the highest filter for Amazon is $200. It's $199. That's the highest filter. They don't want to sell Rolexes in their marketplace because of fraud and all the counterfeits and all the problems they've got, right?
We solved that, and that's why eBay watches came to us to basically secure payments. Insurance didn't work, right? Escrow is the solution. There is a question of how much we want to invest. It is a profitable business. I would like to, you know, obviously grow as fast as I can by raising money from the best place possible, which is selling something useful to customers. You know, but we do have options on the table, if we wanted to raise money. You know, we've had some term sheets put in front of us to do so, and those term sheets have gone up to $50 million in terms of the quantum.
As I mentioned, we're not imminently gonna take any of those, and we're not actively considering taking any of those. You know, the great thing about this business is it is a business that is unique in its positioning. It's doing $1 billion a year in volume, roughly in U.S. dollars, more than that in Australian dollars. It's profitable. You know, we will continue to consider options there, but we're in no hurry or rush to do so. Got a question from Alan Wise. What happened to Fantero and Freemarket.com? Those businesses are still live on their respective domains, and they're operating. We have no great investment in terms of products or engineering into those businesses. They're basically just live and operating.
Fantero is basically a digital content marketplace which allows freelancers to sell logos and stock templates and other things, which may be left over, for example, from work or they might do in their spare time or what have you, or other freelancers might want to use or incorporate. We think in the future that there's big potential here. Right now there's a very small investment. Again, with Freemarket, it's a marketplace buying and selling domain names and so forth. We do think that over time there'll be opportunity for us to extend that into other asset classes and what have you. You know, really the bulk of the focus right now is as I kind of talked about in the results, where we're putting our product and engineering time.
We have limited resources, and we're really focusing most of them where we think we've got the most opportunity. Now, Ethan Chen has got a question. There are quite a few reviews on the web from Freelancer.com platform users complaining about fake listings or bids. How big an issue is this as users are global? Do you ensure sign-ups are real users? And thank you. Okay. On the fake listing issue, what's happening there is during COVID in particular, there was a big uplift in scammers trying to extort money online from people. This is not something that is unique to Freelancer.
This is something that's endemic across not just the freelance services space, but across basically the whole of the online space, whether you're eBay or whether you're Amazon. There have been issues that have been kind of growing in the online space, particularly during COVID. The scam on the fake listing side is basically people posting a project, saying that they are a large company, like Adecco or what have you. They're not obviously. They're saying they've got a lot of work, typically unskilled work, data entry or copywriting or very low-end copywriting. In order for the
What happens is in order for the freelancer to win the job, they say to them, "You've got to pay $7 as a job placement fee or an IP agreement fee or what have you. By the way, here's my Telegram phone number and my WhatsApp link, and click on that to make me the payment. Or make me the payment in Bitcoin," or whatever it may be. Of course, it just turns out to be a scam. They rip off the freelancer and steal the money. We have really cracked down on this in a big way.
In particular now, you can't award a project on Freelancer unless you go through the cart process, which means you've got to basically pay the project fee and put up a milestone and payment. That really dropped the hammer in a big way on this. It's been very effective. If you follow the gross project numbers on the site, there was quite a number of projects that were removed from the marketplace that were scammy. We made some really good progress there. But this is a journey across the entire space. So you cannot award a project anymore unless you pay. That's really stopped freelancers from getting awarded projects from scammers.
They can still try and trick them prior to award, and we've been cracking down on it in a big way. We've really made a lot of improvements. We really now you've got to verify your phone number to post a project. You've got to verify your email address. We think through things like use of video and so forth, we really weed out a lot of the scammers that continue to operate and play these marketplaces and online. On top of that, on the Freelancer side, people complain about fake bids. There's not really fake bids on the Freelancer side. What actually is happening is the freelancers are using tools to assist them in winning jobs, right?
It's a very competitive marketplace to win a job, right? There's about 40, I think 41, 42 average bids per job at the moment that come in, so it's highly competitive. What the freelancers do, it's a bit like eBay. If you purchase something on eBay and the timer's running out on eBay, at the very end, you might get sniped on an auction. People are downloading sniper tools to get in at the very end of the auction to win the bid on buying a product. In the service space it's a bit different. It's the other way around.
In the services space, it's about how can you quickly get in front of the client, and the faster you get in front of them. Can you build that relationship and try and as fast as you can to try and beat all the other bidders that are in? It's a bit like walking into. If you ever walk into a marketplace in an emerging market, you walk into a bazaar in India, or you've walked into a, you know, somewhere in Indonesia or what have you, right? Everyone kind of runs up to you for, you know, they think that you're a tourist and says, you know, "What do you wanna buy? Do you wanna buy watches, handbags? Do you wanna buy shoes?
Do you wanna buy whatever T-shirts?" "Yeah, no problem, no problem, no problem." They're trying to get in front of you as fast as possible. Now, obviously, the freelancers are trying to do that because again, there's a profit motive there in terms of them getting in front of people, you know, very, very quickly. It's a bit complex to solve because the freelancers that are the most egregious users of bots and tools to bid on your project quickly, they're also the power users. They're actually good freelancers. They're the ones that are paying for all the bids. It's not free accounts with only eight bids on sign up that have to wait for a month to be replenished that are really using these tools. It's the power users that are using these tools.
They're actually, when you talk to them, start chatting with them, you'll realize, oh, they're actually great freelancers. It is not a great experience when those bids start coming in super quickly, and in particular, so quick that it's obvious they haven't read the brief and so forth. We are actually making improvements there. In fact, there's stuff going out today to really try and delay that. You've got to be really careful there because on one hand, it can be a bad experience for some users because you go, "They haven't read my brief." You've got to wait five minutes before the good briefs, the good bidding comes in, where people have read the project, they write a quality brief. Over time, what you'll see in terms of the bids is, you can see this yourself.
You post a project, within seconds you'll get the bot bids coming in. After about a minute or two, you'll get the copy-pasters. They're the guys who are manually cutting and pasting into the bid form. After about five minutes, what you get is the better quality bids coming in. Then ultimately, over a period of time, the high-quality freelancers are at the top. They've edited their bids. It would be very high quality and actually looks great. But in that's an initial moment we can really break the magic of the marketplace. You've got to be careful because those bids that are coming in quickly, for some people, they love them. For some people, they're like, "I'm really frustrated getting a job done. Oh, wow, someone's bidding my job.
Oh, wow, okay, I can talk to them." They start talking to them. "Oh, this is incredible." If you post your job, and then we've done a lot of research on this, we've got all the data and all the analysis on this. Every second that someone decides to not engage with the website and the bids don't come in, for example, to drive engagement, they can just log off and go away. The chronic problem here is a brand-new user who's never used the site before, posts a job, nothing happens for a minute, they log off. They get busy tomorrow and forget to come back to the website. They come back on Wednesday or Thursday or whatever. By that stage, the freelancers, because it's so competitive, think, "Oh, this client's not responsive.
They're a poor client to work for. It'll be a pain working for them because they don't respond to me. They've moved on to new jobs. There's like 10,000 new jobs that are being posted on the site. You know, they're off on the new jobs, right? They don't want the old jobs, right? Where the client's taking three days to get back to you. Liquidity does have a big beneficial impact. In fact, it's kind of an interesting thing that's going on right now internally about how we solve it. The data science team is saying liquidity is great. I've got all the data here to prove liquidity is great. We've got to be careful about damaging liquidity.
You've got the product guys, the product manager saying, "No, we've got to create a better experience." We're trying to figure out the happy medium. We think we know what kind of approach we're gonna take here, but we've got to be careful.
In the past, when we've tried to be very gentle about penalizing people, and we've come in, and we've gone, "Okay, let's have an algorithm that goes through, tries to detect spammy bids, put it in a queue, get a human operator look at it, and then make a very careful decision on whether to time out someone for 60 seconds, then time them out for four minutes, and time them out for 16 minutes, and really do a bit of an exponential backoff." You know, these power users who are the most egregious people using these bots and assisted bidding tools, they get very frustrated because they need to be able to pay for all the staff they've got working for them, and they're used to winning lots of jobs and doing, you know, 50 projects a month or whatever it may be.
They will downgrade their membership plans. The membership plans determine how many bids you get. You've got to be kind of careful how you solve the problem. There's a mix of things. What I will say about reviews, and I just want to point this out, is when you actually review, you can do a search of lots of things on the internet. If you go to Google and you type in Freelancer.com and our major competitors, you go to Twitter, and you type in Freelancer.com and our major competitors. You go to YouTube. We have more videos, we have more tweets about us, we have more listings in Google. We have better reviews than our competitors. For example, here, this is just Trustpilot.
We have 10,700 reviews in Trustpilot, 4.5 rating. If you go and type in a competitor, for example, of us into Trustpilot, they've got 8,400 reviews, and they're 4.4. If you go type in another competitor into Trustpilot, 7,000 and 3.9. You know, likewise, if you go to Sitejabber, that's another reviews site. You'll see a very similar thing, and I'll just kind of type in here. We actually have pretty good reviews out there on the internet. You know, it is a good point you're bringing up about spam. I mean, part of the reason why there is spam kind of inherently in these marketplaces, you see there 12,600 reviews on Sitejabber for Freelancer if you type in our competitors.
You can see this, you go onto YouTube, and you type in us versus competitors into YouTube, type into Twitter, et cetera. 2,700 reviews from et cetera. Inherently, what happens there is because it's free to post a project and it's free to bid, and we do that to really make it easy for new users to get going. You know, you do have spam. You can stop it by requiring a listing fee, for example, AUD 5 to post a project, or you can really start heavily monetizing the bids. We really think that we've got a good model in terms of getting people going. Thank you for your question. That was a long answer.
Next question was: With the tech downturn that happened globally, do you think Freelancer will need to downsize overheads or be an opportunity time to acquire more talent for growth? We have actually cut down a bit of the costs in the first half. We are just as part of a good practice. We are doing a review of all our costs and unsubscribing to things that we've got subscribed to and so forth that we don't use. Just over time, you'll find things that your, you know, designers will come along, and they'll subscribe to InVision, and then Figma will come out, and they'll stop using InVision, and they'll subscribe to Figma, and then nobody bothers unsubscribing the old tools. We're doing a review of that, et cetera.
We've really done a cost review in the Q2 of this year, and we have cut back costs quite a lot, and we've really got a target to get to sustained EBITDA profitability from the end of the Q3 . From there on, we should be. I believe there's a strong ability for us to be profitable, and then we can start really investing, backing growth. The primary spend we'll put growth any spend into will be headcount. That's really where we're gonna focus, headcount and marketing, obviously. That's what we're gonna do is we're gonna get it profitable in the Q3 . The target by the end of the Q3 , get profitable.
There should be a big revenue uptick coming in, I believe, in the next 12 months from all the things I've talked about across enterprise, core consumer, Escrow and the Freight division. We will reinvest once we are profitable into growth. Question from Alan Wise. Most news commentary on Freelancer is on Freelancer. However, Escrow is growing stronger and Freightlancer could be exciting and disruptive. What's the plans to tell the story better to potential investors? For example, should there be a dedicated investor website like freelancetechnology.com? It's a good comment. There is a lot of news that's kind of out there about all the businesses. I mean, if you go search in Google, there is news, but you've got to go find it.
We do try and put as much as we can on the ASX feed. We have a real problem with the ASX in getting anything out. The compliance manager that we've been assigned simply will not let us post very much at all to the feed. I don't know why he does this. You go out there, and you can look at Afterpay, and they'll post something about frequent flyer points being eligible or what have you. Neil and I have. Neil, maybe you can comment on this in a second. We have a real shit fight trying to get anything on the ASX feed. They wouldn't let us publish the original announcement about winning the NASA tender. They wouldn't let us publish about eBay. They wouldn't let us publish about Autotrader.
Every single thing we try and get out, it's literally a phone call. We argue with them, and I don't know why they do this. It is the responsibility of directors and officers of the company to make sure that the market is fairly informed. I don't know why they're putting themselves in a position of liability to not let us put stuff out. Neil, maybe you can comment on this 'cause you're the one that does this frequently.
Yeah. Look, we have ongoing debates every time we put out one of these type of announcements, and there've been a few where we've had to modify them. I mean, ultimately, we have got the announcements out that we needed to, but the frustration that we experience sort of doesn't encourage us to sort of put out more because of this p roblem we have all the time.
Now, we did have a conversation. We do have an IR firm that's kind of working with us, and actually, I think they're on the call as well today. There was a discussion today about how we improve this. It's a bit easier getting stuff out to the OTC feed in the U.S. Although there's a bit of a visibility issue we're just trying to rectify there about being able to see it on sort of major business news sites. It is something that I do hear you loud and clear. I've had a lot of feedback from investors. I've seen them in the share trading forums complain about news, et cetera.
We are really trying to figure out how we rectify that, and really do improve the news flow. You know, again, there's this whole continuous disclosure thing. We wanna make sure that, you know, anything that is material does go out on the ASX feed, and everyone does see it. We do literally have a half hour to hour and a half debates and phone calls back and forth trying to get things out. Sometimes in one circumstance, actually, we put a formal complaint in 'cause the market was uninformed about something for a period of time and trading because the compliance manager of the ASX, but it is an issue. Okay, next question from Ray. Does the group have any formal intellectual property protections?
Yes, we do. Now let me, w e don't have much in terms of a patent portfolio, but we've got quite a number of marks around the world. We recently just worked over that because in the U.S., because what they did was they split their mobile phone app, for example, into two apps, one for clients, one for freelancers. Quite cunningly, and I think probably in an attempt to damage our trademark, they called one of the apps Freelancer. Their client app was called Upwork, and their freelancer app was called Freelancer. We actually sued them over that. We just settled, and they've just agreed to over the next period of time change that name. We do strongly defend our marks. We do have global marks.
Our Freelancer mark is incontestable in the U.S. We've had it for so long, and so forth. You know, we don't have much intellectual property protection in terms of patents because most of the stuff we do would be around business method, and as a result, it would be unpatentable in many jurisdictions. It's very hard now in the U.S. to patent sort of business method patents, which, you know, website style stuff. In Australia, you can't do it and so on. We've got obviously trade secrets, but we do protect our marks, and we do go out there and strongly protect them. For example, I don't launch lawsuits against companies, but this was, I thought, quite egregious. We did launch a suit against Upwork. We got settled.
No monetary payment, but they've stopped. We didn't intend on monetary payment. They've stopped using or agreed to stop using our mark for their app. Next question.
In Escrow, what margins, if any, do we make from car financing?
Okay. We don't currently make any margins from the current implementation for car financing, but we will start to make a margin from financing, which we're in very deep discussions with a finance provider we've had a relationship for some time that already does provide finance for our freight business. We're now talking to them in quite a lot of detail about asset financing. We have a proposal in front of them. They're talking to their financiers, and we will at some point I believe potentially quite soon, potentially even before the end of the year be able to offer asset financing in certain classes. We don't know exactly when the margins will be on that. We think they will be very large over time.
We think they'll be larger than the actual payment 'cause the payment's about 100 basis points at the moment. It's quite cost-effective and cheap to use Escrow.com, much cheaper than PayPal, for example, in many circumstances. We think financing can really leverage that margin, quite a lot, by multiple, more than a multiple, more than the basis point, couple hundred basis points, we believe. We don't know exactly where it's gonna end up. We believe over time it'll get better and better and better as we can demonstrate that, and build a track record to allow us to get a wholesale facility, to offer financing at a much lower costing cost for us. We'll see, and we'll keep we'll inform you over time as that becomes available.
Currently, we're not making any money on the financing. It's more of a proof that we can provide it. We're making our money from the payment, the actual transaction itself, and we've facilitated a marketplace of financiers to be available through holding the escrow, the money from the escrow payments and also the loan or the down payment through that down payment being held by Escrow as well. It's something coming. It's a great question. It's something coming, and we'll let you know more as we understand more about it, and we have the offering extended more. Certainly, as we go to more automotive providers and so forth, there may be an opportunity in the future, and I think there certainly will be an opportunity in the future to make more margin from finance as well as the transaction.
Well, obviously in the short term, the more we can integrate with financing providers that make it easier for consumers to get the finance, the transaction flow will increase, you know.
Yeah. We'll see a big expansion. In some of these asset classes, there's no financing providers that are available today at all, and so the whole sector's gonna grow. But I also think that just the model as well, like, you know, the ability to select the car, get it on finance, transact, and just do it all through your phone without having to go to a dealer, without having to go to someone's house and make the payment in cash, I think that's gonna grow the market. I do think if you just think about it intuitively, I mean, they used to say that the people will never buy a car online. Now it's the first place you look to buy a car but can't transact.
Give it five years, 10 years, maybe two years, right? It could be even two years away. The dominant way you maybe buy a car will be through your phone. You won't go down Parramatta Road anymore. You'll just go to your phone, and you'll buy the car, and you'll get much better offers, much lower rates, much more convenient. Car will get delivered to you. You won't have to turn up to someone's house or a back alleyway with a bunch of cash in your pocket or wait around at the dealers. Great question. Any others? Don't be shy. I'd love to answer any question you want. This is your direct link to the management here. You don't have to ask the questions today, or if you wanna follow up, email me directly at investor@freelancer.com.
Neil and I can arrange a one-on-one if you want to do a one-on-one with us. We're happy to do that. Okay. 10 more seconds. Good chance to get your question in. Okay. Well, thank you, everyone. That was the first half of 2022 financial results, and I look forward to speaking to you in a quarter from now. Thank you.