Hello, and welcome to the Freelancer Limited Annual General Meeting for 2021. My name is Matt Barrie. I'm the Chief Executive Officer of Freelancer Limited. I'll ask all mobile devices to be turned off. I don't know why I'm asking this because we've got a small number of people here actually physically or into silent mode. Perhaps if you're on the call, if you can make sure that you don't have any noises that can distract from the proceedings today. Given the current situation of COVID-19, as well as the guidelines and restrictions that were issued by the state and the federal governments on meetings and travel to date, Freelancer has made a decision to hold our AGM virtually, as well as physically. It's a hybrid meeting.
On the March, 20 2020, ASIC issued a no action statement with respect to holding virtual meetings, provided the companies provide shareholders with a reasonable opportunity to vote and participate in the AGM. We have therefore decided to hold our AGM as a hybrid meeting with a quorum of shareholders nominated by the Board to attend the AGM physically, and the remaining shareholders strongly encouraged to participate in the AGM virtually. I'm advised that a quorum of members is physically present, and I therefore declare the meeting open. The first order of business is to introduce my fellow directors who are present virtually at the meeting today. Mr. Darren Williams is a Non-Executive Director. Up until 2015, he was the Chief Technology Officer and an Executive of the Operating Business. Darren is a member of the Nomination and Remuneration Committee and the Audit Committee.
Mr. Simon Clausen is a founding investor and Non-Executive Director. Simon is a member of the Nomination and Remuneration Committee and the Audit Committee. Also in attendance physically is Mr. Neil Katz, our Company Secretary and Chief Financial Officer. I would also like to welcome Sandeep Kumar, the company's Auditor, and other representatives of Hall Chadwick. There are two items of business on today's agenda, the chairman's address and the formal business of the meeting, which includes voting on the resolutions outlined in the notice of meeting. Shareholders will be given an opportunity later in the meeting to ask questions and raise any relevant matters of the board for discussion through me. Right now, I'm just going to go through a presentation. There was also yesterday a half-year update, which was done online. We had a reasonably good attendance for that. That meeting has been recorded.
For any of those that are attending virtually, if you'd like to see the half-year results, you can email investor@freelancer.com and we'll send you a video recording of that. That goes into the sort of the nitty-gritty over the last two quarters in quite a lot of detail. I'm going to present a more high-level overview of the business up until now. If you'd like to have the detailed video recording sent to you of the half-year results with Q&A, we can send that to you if you send us an email. Freelancer as a group now consists of three businesses. We have broadly in the great horizontal areas of labor, payments, and freight. Freelancer is the largest business. It's the world's largest crowdsourcing marketplace with about 54 million users all around the world, 247 countries, regions, and territories.
Over about $4.5 billion worth of jobs have been awarded to date over the history of that marketplace. The second biggest business is Escrow.com. That is a global payments business that has done $5 billion of transactions secured. This is a business that started in 1999, was funded by SoftBank, run by Fidelity, and basically is in a phenomenal position today. It's a global payments business for buying and selling things that are complicated or expensive. We also have a freight division, which we'll talk about a little bit later on, which consists of Freightlancer and Loadshift. Combined, those two businesses did 99 million km of freight pro forma last year in calendar year 2020. Freelancer is really the partner in the new world of work, solving a trillion-dollar problem.
5 billion people on the planet live on $30 a day or less and need to get a better job. There's a skill shortage. The defining characteristic of the 21st century is the competition for intellectual capital. Globally, every woman on the planet needs to have 2.1 children to maintain the population. All throughout the world, even in Bangladesh, the replacement rate is lower. The birth rate is lower than the replacement rate. The fertility rate is lower than the replacement rate. You've got to go to places like Sub-Saharan Africa to be dramatically above. We're not making any more people. Education as a percentage of discretionary income is dropping quite remarkably in the Western world. It's still very high in places like Korea and China, but it's low in the rest of the world.
We're not making any more people at the rate we used to, and we're not treating education as important as we should. At the same time, we have a great emerging market in places like India, where you've got once in a lifetime influx of people into the workforce. India has about 14 million people a year who are skilled, young, hungry, and native English speakers. All around the world, entrepreneurs, whether they're in small businesses, whether they're in mid-sized businesses, or whether they're corporate entrepreneurs, need to get things done. We have the world's largest online workforce for getting things done and helping create the future through development of products and services through freelancer.com. This is a high-level picture of our marketplace. Many of you have seen it before. The white dots are where our users are.
The pink lines are where jobs are being posted. The blue lines are where jobs are being performed. We are global in nature. Anywhere there's electricity and there's internet, we have people. Primarily, jobs are being posted in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and going to places like India, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and so forth. We have 53 regional websites. We're in 34 languages. We're in 39 currencies. There's no other marketplace globally that has the breadth we have in terms of skills, users, languages, and so forth, and the ability to get things done right from something as simple as $10 right up to something in many hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars. We've had over 20 million jobs posted to date. We're extremely liquid. Nowhere else is liquid globally as we are.
63% of jobs get bid on within 60 seconds with a 24 average number of bids per project. We're also in an environment where increasingly over time from here and for the foreseeable future, people will increasingly working online, trying working online for the first time and experiencing the ability to and the advantages of working online with people. In terms of the first half statistics, we had a phenomenal increase in web traffic, up 89% in terms of sessions to 132 million in the half year on the half year before, which is in 2020. 136% increase in new visitors, four million increase in new users, and so forth, and about almost a million jobs were posted on the platform. In terms of the dynamics, about 30% of the jobs are websites, IT, and software, and there's hundreds of categories underneath that.
About 28% of the jobs are broadly in the fields of design, and that covers everything from architecture to interior design to music composition, CAD models, and so forth, and they're very long tail. The average project size is around $200 and just over the long term, just trends up over time. We're the lowest cost and largest cloud labor platform globally in terms of breadth of talent. Nowhere else has a greater breadth of talent than we do, and we're basically trying to build the Amazon of the space, the widest range at the lowest cost. It's free to post a project. It's free to try to talk to people, see samples of work, and so forth. If you award a job to someone and they accept it, we charge you 3%.
On the Freelancer side, it's free to sign up, free to talk to people, free to bid on jobs. If you win work, we charge you 10%. It's very cost effective. This is an example of a project on the site. You enter a title, description, a budget. You put it live. 68% of jobs get bids within 60 seconds, 24 bids on average. In some circumstances, hundreds of bids or more. You can talk to people and select someone. The other way of getting work done is through posting a contest. You put up a prize, people compete for the prize. It's a very iterative process. You can say, I like this, I don't like this, change this, change that, and you can get to a solution pretty quickly.
This is an example of some packaging design that was done by two for $260 , and there was 186 entries. Nowhere else in the world can you get so much collaborative contribution for so little cost to get things done. You can do this in any of the 2,000 different categories. At the moment, we get 15 million entries per year going into contests, from 1.5 million participants, about 1.3 million entries per month. 85% of contests get an entry within an hour. It's actually about 280 entries per contest. This says 240, it's actually closer to 280 at this point in time. The metrics are up and to the right. This is actually quite phenomenal. If you've never tried contests before, put $10 in, get some business cards done.
You'll be absolutely amazed by what you can get done for so little and the quality. This is an example of some of the work that's been done through Freelancer. The quality is amazing. We're showing very visual things here in nature, but really any job you can possibly think of, you can post on the platform and you can get done from a skilled talent base that's global, and you can find any skill set you want, any language you want, any location you want. That's some pretty amazing quality of work there. We have an enterprise division, which is targeting the bigger town. This is Fortune 500 and equivalent organizations globally. We have new leadership under [Sean McMeekin], who was the founding VP of sales at Groupon.
He took it from zero in the Australia, New Zealand region to AUD 1 billion in turnover per annum over six years and AUD 250 million in revenue. In the first half, enterprise GMV grew about 227% on the second quarter and 213% in the first half. New clients ramped up quite strongly, and some of the new clients actually ramped up to be in our top 10 accounts. We've got some pretty exciting things going on. Deloitte, we've built a custom platform called Deloitte MyGigs for Deloitte Consulting U.S.A., which is designed to connect Deloitte consultants with each other globally and Deloitte consultants to the cloud. Deloitte's the largest of the Big Four. They've got 440,000 staff. They said to us they can't go 10x from here. That'll be 10 million employees. They've got to go to a new model.
Universally, Fortune 500 has come to the conclusion that some percentage of their workforce will come from the cloud in the future. They're not sure whether it's 5%, 10%, 15%, or 25%, but that's the range. They're not sure if it's one year, three years, five years, 10 years away, but that's the time period. COVID has accelerated everything, they do know they're going to have to transform their workforces, and this is one of the greatest transformations in the workforce, I think, in history. Deloitte's a great example of that. We've now got the go ahead to go to stage 3, which is connecting their consultants to the cloud, and that'll be 52,000 consultants to the world of 53 million freelancers. We've got some amazing things happening with other corporates as well, we're also doing some great things with nation-states now.
The governments of Saudi Arabia and the Government of Egypt are some examples. We've worked for some time with the Government of Malaysia, and in fact, the Government of Cambodia approached us this week. In Saudi Arabia, they have a national marketplace that they've funded so that all Saudi Arabian citizens will be able to participate in the world of work. In fact, they're creating a new labor class in Saudi Arabia. It's not just full-time jobs and casual jobs and part-time jobs. It's freelance jobs that will be a new category recognized by the government. They've approached us to help them with this, and also as part of that, help skill up and train their citizens for the world of work online and to help that talent reach jobs from companies all around the world and paying for that.
There's some pretty amazing things we're doing there in combination also with a major corporate in the region. We're also doing this with the government of Egypt. They've been paying us already to train up their workforce, get them online, get their profiles up and running, and get the first jobs won through companies, not just in the Middle East, but all around the world. We're doing things not just with large corporates and the largest corporates in the world, but also with large governments. Another corporate engagement of note, which is pretty exciting, and there's many in the pipeline here in various stages of pilots, multi-country pilots, production, and early stage, for a global computer company. This is a computer company that where probably you might have the products in your own home already. They're looking to transform the way that they do field services.
They've come to us because they need to have the scale and the scope and the reach to be able to provide technical repairs to computer and printer equipment all around the world. When you go and break your computer in certain regions now, and you go to their call center or you log something on their website to get your computer or printer repaired. It is one of our Freelancers who's been trained, who will go out to your location and repair or replace that item. We are successfully running in Indonesia. Our pilot in India is now expanding to 18 regions, so it's going national. We have an Australian pilot, which has been in planning for a long period of time and has been slightly delayed due to the lockdowns, but basically has commenced.
We have 13 other countries we're going to after that, including the U.S., and we've already started discussions about how we're going to do the U.S. launch. This is a very, very substantial engagement that is a very, very meaningful number if we can get to the prize at the end of the rainbow, in terms of the GMV contribution, it's very large compared to our global GMV. In the half, we also won the Best Comprehensive Solution from the Lighthouse Research Awards. There's a lot of stuff happening with NASA. We've won multiple task orders with them. We've won a task order with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for about $300,000 worth of work for power engineering, to find more efficient ways to test hydroelectric power energy systems so that you don't have to take them offline when you do the testing.
With the National Institutes of Health through NASA, we have won a data science challenge for $ 400 and something thousand for finding ways to lower child morbidity through insights and data science. We have also won another task order with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for river hydraulic modeling and sedimentation modeling through optimization of computational fluid dynamics, through effectively computational computer science to find more efficient ways to optimize large matrices. In fact, this morning, we won the biggest task order yet with NASA for a software development. We're basically going to announce that shortly in terms of the quantum and what we're doing there. There's plenty more to come here with our relationship with NASA. It just shows you couldn't get a more marquee organization globally than the U.S. Space Administration.
In fact, they've done such a wonderful job of embracing the future of work that they are now being used by all the government agencies, the federal government of the U.S., to help drive that through all sorts of different programs. We also have a great engagement with IBM, which I want to call out, where they've committed to spend seven digits or more in terms of training freelancers and IBM technologies to enable their customers to get freelancers to help them adopt IBM solutions. In addition with that, certify with IBM skills. That engagement is going incredibly well. We wrote a case study on that. That's how we won the award from White House Research in the U.S. for HR Tech for 2021. That's the award there. There's some more details on this deck, which I won't get into detail.
We're not just working with low-end and small projects and small business and SOHO. We're all out to the very high-end and some of the largest organizations in the world. This is an example of a telecommunications infrastructure project that was done for $1,500 in 2 weeks by Deloitte, which consisted of a 70-page report. If you think about a 70-page report at the level that you have to do for a Deloitte customer, the ability to get this done for $1,500 is unparalleled anywhere in the world. This is for Airbus, one of the two top aerospace manufacturing companies, for helping more efficiently look at their assembly line in Toulouse, where they assemble Airbus planes and helicopters. In particular, that was the helicopter line. This is for Fujitsu in combinatorial algorithms. We've done a lot of stuff with NASA.
Over 14,000 designs have been sourced from 6,000 freelancers. We've won jointly a $25 million tender. I've talked about some of these task orders we've won, and again, another one this morning. We've worked for the U.S. Department of Energy. We've worked for Novo Nordisk. In fact, over 70% of Fortune 500s do make use of the Freelancer platform. Not through our enterprise program in terms of an organized strategy, but just use the site anyway. Just like, I would think probably 99% of organizations now use eBay. This number will increase over time, and we're going to get them into an organized program through our enterprise sales team. We've done a lot of work on mobile in the first half. That's starting to pay off in spades.
We've redesigned the front-end architecture of the website, which is really a complete rebuild over the last couple of years, and we have deployed that. That's allowed us to replace our mobile suite with a modern 2.0 version of mobile. Our first step with this was last year replacing the mobile web version of Freelancer. If you use your phone and use your web browser and go to Freelancer, we've replaced that with a responsive version of the desktop website. This has led to a dramatic increase in revenue from mobile web. In the first half of this year, figures are up 96% year-on-year. This has allowed us to replace our iOS and our Android apps. Our iOS app is now a Capacitor-wrapped version of the responsive website. It's live. It's deployed. It's been out just for a number of weeks.
Already, the revenue's up 15% year-on-year, and we do expect it to get closer to the triple digits that we've seen with mobile web. We've just got a few things we've got to improve in terms of the polish, but that's out there. Android is now in 50/50 in production. In the next couple of weeks, it will go into 100% in production. I'll report on that in these following quarters in terms of progress. We have a managed service layer, which consists of two levels. The first is we have recruiters that will help you find the best freelancer for the job. We have a copilot service, which is a project management service where for an hourly rate, we will help you do anything you need with a project. We will listen to what you need. We'll write a spec for you.
We'll break it down into tasks. We'll log it into the system. We'll hire freelancers with the recruiters, and we'll run weekly sprints for you. There's been a 38% increase in preferred talent earnings in the first half through these managed service programs to our top freelancers. We have an API, which allows you to harness 50 million people through a software interface. We've built the first app, which is actually in the Play Store, and it's in the iOS store, and you can download it, and you can try it for yourself. I've always said that Uber's got 6 drivers or 7 million drivers last time I looked, maybe it's got 8, 9, 10 million drivers now. I don't know what the number is, but we've got 50 million, 4 million freelancers, and we probably have more drivers than Uber does.
The interface for Freelancer is not great to be picked up in a car and driven somewhere and dropped off. You want to post a project, enter a description, a budget, wait for people bidding, select them, et cetera. The Uber interface is very simple. In fact, it's about as simple as you can possibly get. You drop a pin, you put a location in, and a car will pick you up and take you somewhere. We thought, let's show a proof of concept. Let's build an Uber for something and just show what we can do with 50 million people in our workforce and how liquid it is. We built an Uber for photos. It's called Photo Anywhere. You can download it today. For $35, you can type in an address anywhere in the world.
Someone will go take a photograph and send it back to you, or a series of photographs, 5 of them for $35, and send it back to you within 24 hours- 48 hours. I personally use this, and it has worked for me in Uzbekistan. It's worked for me in Timbuktu. It worked for me in Chernobyl. I got photos back in 24 hours. It's worked for me in New York, Gili Islands, Bali, or ever in India. It's worked for Roman Colosseum in the middle of the U.K., the mountain Wyoming, and so forth. It's a pretty amazing demonstration of the liquidity of the platform, and there's a lot of innovation that can go from here. For example, there's a company in Asia worth about $10 billion called Gojek, and it's available in four countries.
Simply, you type in an address, someone will go to that address, buy an item for you, and bring it to you. Right? The ability for us to build this now in a matter of weeks to months is fairly straightforward. This is a $10 billion company that services in four regions, while we would be able to service the globe using the power of our workforce. It's a job that's accessible to anyone. Anyone with a smartphone can go to a location and buy something for you and bring it to you. This is all powered by Freelancer Global Fleet. Freelancer Global Fleet is also what's powering the field services example I gave you previously with the global computer company.
It's the ability to access a fleet of talent anywhere in the world, track their location, task them to go to locations and do things. It's pretty exciting. This is senior management team. I won't get into details there. We've won a bunch of awards and continue to win awards. That's the first of the businesses. The second of the businesses is Escrow.com. This is a pretty phenomenal business. It's a payment system for buying and selling things that are expensive or complicated. It's solving two basic premises here. There's a lot of innovation around payments, but most of the innovation around payments is around buying and selling cups of coffee. All the kids coming out of Stanford and Harvard, their experience is buying cups of coffee.
There's neat ways of buying cups of coffee with your phone, of tapping your phone with someone else's phone and splitting the price of a cup of coffee, or buy now, pay later for a cup of coffee, using facial recognition maybe to pay for a cup of coffee, maybe lending you money to buy a cup of coffee. They're not thinking about buying and selling cars, boats, airplanes, jewelry, gemstones, diamonds, importing shipping containers from overseas, oil wells, trips up to space, et cetera. These are all either large payments or expensive or complicated payments. There's two major problems in the payment space. The first problem is that payments above $3,000 really breaks down in the real world. Credit cards are great for about $3,000, and then $4, $5, $6, $7, $8, $9, $10, $20,000.
Some cards might handle payments that big, but for the most part, they start to break down, right? Same with PayPal. You wouldn't sell or buy a house or a car with PayPal or a plane or a boat. Maybe at the very, very low end. Not anything of a substantial size. The other problem is in the untrustworthy environment, payments fail. I buy a phone on eBay, it gets sent to me. Maybe it's broken, maybe its screen's chipped, maybe it's not as described, maybe it's stolen. If I have a problem, we compete at the low end with buyer protection from PayPal and eBay and credit cards. I've got to fill in an insurance claim form. Was it as described? Is it in an insurable area? Is it within an insurable threshold? What actually happened? I fill in that form, I submit it.
Six weeks-eight weeks later, an insurance assessor might get back to me, and maybe I'll get my money back. If it's eBay, I might get hold in a rolling reserve for six months before I actually get my funds. It's a terrible experience. With Escrow, quite simply, we hold the money until the transaction goes through. It's as simple as it is. We're used for payments from hundreds of dollars up to $100 million, potentially more. It's all these sort of things here. Quite simply, we hold the money while the transaction goes through. It's a pretty phenomenal business. It's done $5 billion in payment volume. It's profitable business. In last year, it did $489 million in gross marketplace volume or gross payment volume. In the first half of this year, we were up 43.7% year-on-year in terms of GMV.
In the second quarter of this year, we're up 105.5% in gross payment volume. There's a picture of it just here in terms of GPV. Where is it? I think it's actually out of this particular deck, but it's a pretty phenomenal up-and-to-the-right graph in terms of the growth rate. In the second quarter, it more than doubled the volume through it. There's over two million customers, and we've got marquee platforms now starting to integrate Escrow for the first time. That's really become enabled by our API, which we've built. You can integrate Escrow as simple as PayPal. That's been deployed and got out of beta really last year. One of our first marquee customers to integrate that was eBay Motors USA. In the U.S., you can buy and sell cars now for the first time and pay for them.
What might be remarkable to a lot of people is most car platforms globally or car marketplaces are actually classified sites. You can't actually pay for the car because PayPal and credit cards break down. The car marketplaces around the world actually don't know if the car is sold. They make an assumption that the car is sold when the listing doesn't get renewed. There's a listing gets posted, it gets renewed. The listing goes down. They make an assumption that the car is sold, but they don't know that for sure. We're in eBay Motors. The success of that led to eBay watches. Now buyers and sellers can use escrow to protect the transaction. For high-end luxury watches, they've also launched an authentication network to completely stop fraud on the eBay watch marketplace.
Traditionally, up until now, people might think, why would I buy a watch from eBay? It might be counterfeit. The way they've stopped that is through Escrow.com and through an authentication network. Now, if you buy a high-end luxury watch, the seller can no longer sell and send the watch directly to the buyer. It goes to a third-party authentication network. The authenticator will look at the watch, open it up, check the parts, make sure they're genuine, clean it, put a sticker on it, give you a certificate, put it in a nice box if it doesn't come with the original packaging, and send it to you. Through the entire process, the money is held with Escrow.com, and then when you receive the box, you can then decide to hit the button to release the funds. We're going to go into more eBay categories.
There's a wide variety of areas within eBay we're going to touch. Also in many different industry verticals. We've got a good presence in domain names and IP addresses. We're going to tip the whole automotive industry globally. We're in Classic Cars. We're in Hagerty. We're in AutoHunter, which is basically AutoTrader U.S. We are in fine art. We're in Artsy. We're in Artland. We're in business sales, mergers, and acquisitions through Shopify and Flippa. If you want to buy a Shopify store, you have to pay with escrow.com and so forth. This is a global business, but it's mainly in some nexus to the U.S. Over the next couple of years, these are the industry verticals we're going to go into. Note the Y-axis is logarithmic, so these sectors get bigger and bigger and bigger as we go through.
IP addresses, domain names, watches, fine art, used construction equipment, import-export, jewelry, used vehicles, M&A, manufactured goods, to real estate. We are the only multi-jurisdictional online Escrow.com company globally. We have 52 financial services licenses granted or in application. We're licensed in every state in the U.S. bar three, the other three we expect to complete this year. We're literally in the final stages. We're licensed in Australia, we're licensed in Canada, we have a license with the FCA in the U.K., which is also imminent. It's an incredible business in terms of the moat around it from a regulatory perspective. There are only a very small number of niche escrow providers globally that might exist. This is California, for example. In the state of California, there's only really four operating businesses that currently exist today. There's Upwork, which only uses the escrow for themselves internally.
There's SeedTrust, which is for surrogacy. Vecta, which is for marijuana, and there's us. That's for the state of California, one of the largest markets in the U.S. We're in boats, cars, airplanes. This is an example of a screenshot from eBay Motors. This is the first car that sold through eBay Motors. It allowed a transaction to happen from one coast to the other coast securely, which is usually a difficult thing to do. Do I send the money first, or do they send the car first? We protect fine art, watches, antiques, jewelry. This is screenshots of the eBay integration for watches in the U.S. There's two great little videos there you can click on and download if you get access to this presentation and watch how eBay is promoting escrow to its customers.
Every time we get integrated with a platform, they've got to promote escrow because the regulators insist that the consumer needs to know where their money is. We're integrated in Flippa for business sales. This is a neat one that happened in the second quarter. We're integrated with Energy Domain. In the first half and mainly in the second quarter, we sold 240 gross acres of oil and gas and mineral rights. People are buying and selling oil wells through escrow. This will lead us into real estate, which is a massive market globally. Industrial equipment, import-export, service contracts. Everyone in Silicon Valley knows the business because they bought their domain name through us. Uber, Snapchat, SpaceX, Twitter, Instagram, Chrome, Gmail, Hulu, they all bought their domain names through escrow.com.
There's an API which can now integrate, which makes it super simple, and we have a great management team behind this business, and there'll be more to come from that. To wrap up the third business we've got, which I think has been a bit of a quiet one, but now has really come into its own, is the freight division. This is actually a phenomenal leg. Anything that's physical that is sold through escrow needs to be moved. We make 1.3% roughly from escrow, and we make 13% from the freight. There's a lot of synergy there. Furthermore, freight is one of the 200 categories of Freelancer. The process of getting a load moved from A to B, the technology is the same as on freelancer.com.
On Freelancer.com, you put in a title, a description, a budget, hit submit, people bid on the project, you pick someone, they do the job for you. In the freight division, you put in the title, a description, a budget, where you want something picked up, where you want something dropped off. Drivers bid on it, you award them, they get paid, the job gets completed. It's exactly the same technology. In fact, what we're doing right now is we're moving the whole freight division onto an enterprise version of Freelancer. It's one of the 2,000 different categories we have. This is a phenomenal business for a bunch of different reasons. These are already existing customers. Newcrest Mining in Cadia, in Australia, one of the biggest gold mines in Australia, uses us, has spent over seven digits in 12 months in terms of freight through Freightlancer.
We've been used in the Sydney Metro. We've been used by Redpath Mining, a big Canadian mining company. Combined pro forma, the Loadshift acquisition, combined with Freightlancer, did over 70,000 loads in 2020, up 29% year on year, and almost 100 million km of freight. In the first half, we did 51 million km of freight, up 20.6% on PCP. You can see that COVID has accelerated things. The roads are clear, and now is the time to be moving things around the country to get things done. COVID's been very beneficial for this business. Primarily moving things like heavy machinery for construction, mining, rail, and so forth. Moving cars, moving pallets, shipping containers.
This is an example of Newcrest. These are actual real pictures of things we've moved for Cadia, one of the largest gold mines in Australia, saving 30% because of the competitive environment for bidding. This is Redpath Mining, actual pictures of what we've been moving. This is EMS, actual pictures of what we've been moving. It's an incredible business. We are by far the largest freight marketplace in Australia now. The aim is to take this global. The aim is to monetize the 100 million km of freight per annum with basically a commission-based model. I will say that on the average weekday now, more freight is posted in our freight division than the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The distance from the Earth to the Moon is 384,000 km. In the average day now, it's about 450,000 km per day being posted.
There is a lot of freight that is getting moved with this particular business, and that freight needs to be paid for. Escrow and Freightlancer go hand in hand. In fact, the sales teams are actually going to enterprise customers independently and actually discovering they are talking to the same customers. The payments business is going into the auction marketplaces and talking to them, and they are finding out the freight division is also talking to them about moving things. Very, very complementary businesses, and the technology stack is exactly the same as the Freelancer technology stack, just with a bit of front-end tweaking. It is a pretty amazing business, and there is actually more slides in the half-year deck if you would like to look at them. Just some final wrap-up in terms of the half-year results. The first half-year group net revenue was AUD 27.8 million.
In AUD, it was down 5.7%, but it was an all-time record in U.S. dollars and up 11% or 10.8% to $21.5 million. Freelancer was down about 11.5% in AUD, but up 4% in U.S. dollars. Escrow had a record. It was AUD 5.1 million, up 33.7%, or AUD 3.9 up 56.9%. The GPV had a big jump up. It was AUD 566 million, up 35.9%, or $437 million, up 59.2%. Freelancer was effectively flat at AUD 68 million or an all-time record in U.S. dollars of 14% up to $52.4 million. In the first half, Escrow was up 48% to AUD 475 million or 73% to AUD 366.67 million. In the second quarter, Escrow knocked the lights out with AUD 270.5 million, up 75% on PCP, or AUD 208.5 million, up 105.5% on PCP. In fact, ex China, it was even faster. It was up 113% in the quarter.
We're on track for over $1 million to go through our bank accounts for the first time in the group this calendar year. Currency did hit us this half pretty hard. It was negative 17.4%. 72% of our revenue is in Australian dollars and 4%-- Sorry, in U.S. dollars and 4% is in Australian dollars. It was really a translation for the accounts because our business primarily services U.S. customers. Gross margins were consistently high at 83%. Operating EBITDA was effectively flat at negative AUD 2 million, and operating NPAT, the same, likewise negative flat at AUD 1.6 million or breakeven. We had positive operating cash flows, more cash coming into the business at AUD 2.7 million. It is down a bit on the first half of last year, which had a monster half of AUD 6.2 million. Cash and cash equivalents were still strong at AUD 31.8 million.
It's down AUD 2.5 million , $ 4 million was spent on acquiring the Loadshift business. Here we are. This is details about Loadshift. I won't get into the detail, effectively it's about $300 million worth of freight goes to that business every year, the goal now is to try and monetize that. The great thing is it's just like Freelancer in terms of the technology, the average project size is not $200, it's $ 4,000. These are very, very chunky projects, there's a lot of volume that goes to this business. We hit a few records in the first half. At the very end of the last quarter, we hit 520,000 km of freight in a day on June 20, we hit over 10 million km of freight in a month.
This is what the GPV looks like. A big uptick this year in terms of GPV. Got some work to do on the revenue, but with the jaws operating leverage ready to really move, a little jump in revenue here is gonna mean a lot to the bottom line. This is what the cash flow profile looks like. We had positive operating cash flow, and we spent a little bit to buy a business. This is what the GMV looks like for Freelancer. We had the best quarter in first quarter of this year that we've had since IPO in terms of the growth year-on-year. In the second quarter, it eased off a little bit as we cycled the second quarter of 2020 global lockdowns where 94% of the world's workforce was subject to stay-at-home provisions.
We expect this to grow from here as we're doing a whole bunch of things around collaboration and so on. This is the graph I was looking for previously about Escrow. This shows you just what a phenomenal quarter and the phenomenal last 12 months have been for the Escrow business. This is a 20-year history of quarterly growth in GPV. AUD 208.5 million in the second quarter. Pretty soon, we'll be doing $1 billion a year through our bank accounts with Escrow. This is the P&L statement. We're really poised for some leverage here in the fact that the EBITDA, the EBIT, and the NPAT is effectively a breakeven. It doesn't take much in incremental revenue from here to really drive the profitability. You can see here the employee expenses went up 13% in the first half.
That was in line with the headcount, which is roughly about 12%, 13%. Administrative expenses were down 8%. Marketing-related costs were down 36% through a new predictive model for advertising targeting with Freelancer, which allows us to get a return on investment much more efficiently on the ads. We deployed that model in the second quarter. We did actually have very tight constraints in that model. We did actually cut the advertising spend quite a lot. In fact, probably overshot. We will be ramping that spend up again in the third quarter, and that will be driving the revenue as well positively, in the third quarter. The great thing is we have a model now which is much more efficient at predicting the return on investment for every dollar we spend on the paid channels.
It's important to note that 66%, roughly, of all projects on Freelancer are from repeat customers. About 33% are from new customers. Of those new customers, about 30% are from paid marketing as opposed to organic marketing or free marketing from things like SEO. We had a little bit of uplift in occupancy cost. That's really quite immaterial in the big scheme of things. That was really from the Sydney office that we moved to in March of last year, which we're fully kind of seeing that through now. Then there was a tiny drop in share-based payments expenses. It doesn't take much in terms of revenue from here to really drop down to the bottom line, because you can see there is not very much spent on marketing. There's no CapEx.
It's basically on headcount and any incremental gain in revenue, unless it's soaked up by headcount, it's going to accidentally produce strong results in the bottom line. At 465 staff in the company at this point in time. This is a snapshot of the balance sheet. In addition to the AUD 31.8 million we've recorded here, there's another AUD 41 million of cash off balance sheet in trust with the Escrow accounts. There's not much really to say at this point about that. Ended with about 55 million users in the group, 20 million jobs, and I think we're a pretty unique company, not just on the ASX, but globally. That was a fairly long presentation. I apologize for that.
If you'd like to learn more about more recently what's been happening in the business, you can email investor@freelancer.com, and we do have a recording of yesterday's half year results that has the Q&A in it as well, and you can get a copy of that if you'd like. Also, we're always available to do one-on-ones with investors if you email the same address and request a meeting. I will now turn to the formal business of the meeting. As the notice of meeting has been sent to all shareholders, unless there are any objections, I will take it as read. You may, I believe, leave a message in the chat if you're online. I'll wait for a second for any objections, and I'll just look at the Operator to see if there's anything coming through in the chat. Chris? Nothing?
All shareholders should show their video if they're going to vote.
All shareholders, by the way, have to show you a video if you have to vote, apparently. That's just been advised by me. If you do plan on voting, please turn your video camera on at this point. Thank you. Let the record show there are no objections. The first item of form business agenda is to receive and consider the annual financial report of Freelancer Limited, the Directors' report, remuneration report, and independent auditors' report for the year ended December 31, 2020. I advise that Sandeep Kumar from the company's auditor, Hall Chadwick, is also present today and is available to answer any questions relevant to the conduct of the audit, the preparation and content of the audit report, and the accounting policies adopted by the company and the independence of the auditor.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'll take the annual financial report and the directors' report, remuneration report, and the independent auditors' report as having been received. You'll be aware that we have distributed the annual report electronically and have offered proxy voting online. I will now invite members to raise any additional matters to the Board or the Auditors which relate to those reports or activities of the Freelancer Group in general. Would any member physically present asking a question, please turn on your video camera, Well, not you don't have to stand, you can sit, and state their name before proceeding with their question. Please wait until you're provided with the forum before asking your question.
Would any member attending virtually, please use the chat function on your screen to flag your intent to ask a question, the Operator will let us know that your question wants to be asked and also tell you what order they will be answered in. Now I'm opening it up for questions to Sandeep Kumar from the company's auditor, Hall Chadwick. Sandeep there, hello. Wait a minute. If anyone wants to ask a question, you can ping something in the chat, turn your camera on, and we will turn it over to you. Okay. Anything in the chat?
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Chris, sorry?
[inaudible]
Okay. No. Okay. There's a general question which I'll take for later from Alex, which I'll get to at the end. Okay, we're up to the first resolution for the voting, that the remuneration report of the company for the financial year ended December 31 2020, as contained in the Directors' report, be adopted. Please note that the vote on this resolution is an ordinary resolution and it is advisory only. The company each year reviews its remuneration policies and approach and strives to pay its employees fairly and competitively and with a view to reasonable expectations of the investment community. Before asking members to move and second the motion, I would like to give members an opportunity to raise any questions related to this resolution as it is now before the meeting.
Anyone physically, could you please stand, wait for the microphone, say your name, et cetera, which is going to be unlikely because there's a small number of people here. Would any person virtually, please turn your camera on and use the chat function on your screen to flag your intent to ask a question, and I'll then take your question in the order flagged. I'll wait a few minutes if anyone wants to turn your camera on and ask any questions. Nothing, Chris? No questions. Could I please ask a member physically present to move a motion that the remuneration report of the company for the financial year ended December 31, 2020, as contained in the Directors' report, be adopted? Brett. Adam Byrnes. Would another member care to second that motion? Katz.
I advise we received 26,581,090 proxy votes in favor of the resolution, 234,452 proxy votes against the resolution, 100,880 undirected proxy votes which can be voted by me as Chairman, 2,319,039 votes that cannot be voted as they are excluded, and 160,377,500 abstained votes. Those undirected proxies which I can vote for will be voted for in favor of the resolution. I would now like to put the motion to the meeting. Would all those members who are in favor of the motion please raise their hand. I think you can also turn your video camera on and raise your hand as well, if you want. Raise your hand if you're in favor. Okay. Would all those members who are against the motion please raise their hands. Okay, I declare the motion carried.
Moving on to resolution number 2, that Mr. Simon Clausen, who is required to retire under the company's constitution and who, being eligible, offers himself for re-election, is re-elected as Director of the company. The resolution is an ordinary resolution. Mr. Clausen's credentials are outlined in the notice of the meeting. I also advise that Mr. Clausen's fellow Directors strongly support his re-election. Does any shareholder have a question related to this resolution? If you want to ask a question about Simon's re-election, you may do so by turning on your camera and putting something in the chat. Anything, Chris? No. Would a member care to move a motion that Mr. Clausen's re-election occur as a Director? Thank you, Mr. Katz. Would another member care to second the motion? Mr. Byrnes.
I advise received 174,682,744 proxy votes in favor of the resolution, 13,793,148 proxy votes against the resolution, 1,136,419 undirected proxy votes which may be voted by me as Chairman, and 650 abstained votes. I will now put the motion to the meeting. Would all members who are in favor of the motion please raise their hand? Would all members who are against the motion please raise their hand, turn their camera on. I declare the motion carried and congratulate Mr. Clausen on his re-election as a Director of the company.
The next item on the agenda is resolution 3, that pursuant to and in accordance with the Listing Rule 7.2, exception 13, and for all other purposes, shareholders approve the company's long-term incentive plan and the grant of share rights and issue of underlying securities pursuant to the plan on the terms and conditions set out in the explanatory memorandum accompanying the notice of meeting. The resolution is an ordinary resolution. I am also advised the Directors, with Mr. Matt Barrie abstaining, unanimously recommend that shareholders vote in favor of resolution 3. Does any shareholder have a question regarding this resolution? Anything, Chris? No questions. No questions. Would a member care to move the motion along with the long-term incentive plan? Mr. Katz. Would another member care to second that motion? Mr. Byrnes.
I advise that we received 174,682,744 proxy votes in favor of the resolution, 13,793,148 proxy votes against the resolution, 1,136,419 undirected proxy votes to be voted by me as Chairman, and 650 abstained votes. I'll now put the motion to the meeting. Would all the members who are in favor of the motion please raise their hand. Would all the members who are against the motion please raise their hand and turn their camera on, so I can see you if you like to do that. I declare the motion carried. The next item on the agenda is resolution 4, that pursuant to Section 136.2 of the Corporations Act, the constitution of the company be amended and set out in the amended constitution with the amendments marked up and tabled at the general meeting convened at the close of notice of meeting. This resolution is a special resolution.
I've been advised the directors unanimously recommend that shareholders vote in favor of resolution 4. Does any shareholder have a question regarding this resolution, please turn your camera on and put everything in the chat. No questions? Would a member care to move the motion to amend the company's constitution? Thank you, Mr. Byrnes. Would another member care to second the motion? Mr. Katz. I am advised we received 174,682,744 proxy votes in favor of the resolution, 13,793,148 proxy votes against the resolution, 1,136,419 undirected proxy votes which may be voted by me as chairman, and 650 abstained votes. I have now put the motion to the meeting. Would all members who are in favor of the motion please raise their hand. Okay. Would all members who are against the motion please raise their hand and turn their camera on. I declare the motion carried.
We now move to Q&A. You may direct your questions on any topic to any of the Directors. I also have Adam Byrnes here and Neil Katz, and Jackson Elsegood, who's the General Manager of Escrow.com, and Tom Cavanagh, who's the CEO of Freightlancer. I presume you can ask anyone. I'm sure we can find a way to splice them into the meeting. We had a first question, Chris, already from Alex, which was what?
How big does Escrow need to be before you will spin it off? The answer to that question is, at some point, Escrow will be a public company and will be standing on its own two feet. The question is, at what point in time may that occur, and how big does Escrow need to be for that to occur? The great thing is that Escrow is getting to scale and is growing extremely rapidly. The GPV in the second quarter is up 105% year-on-year. We are getting, this year I won't give a forecast in terms of revenue, but if you look next year at the size and the scale that the Escrow business is potentially going to be, it's probably going to be the size and the scale that Freelancer was, and the growth rates that Freelancer was, if not faster, when Freelancer IPO'd.
At the time of the IPO, Freelancer was doing about AUD 18 million in revenue on a forward basis. It IPO'd in November, so it was towards the end of the year, so only had about six weeks before the end of the year. About 80% year-on-year revenue growth rate. If you look at the Escrow business, it's going to be about the same size and shape in about 12 months from now. From that perspective, I think the window is opening very soon in terms of thinking about the optionality of that business, in terms of its future structure, where it's domiciled, how it's domiciled, and when you might take it public, whether you might do a pre-IPO round, whether you might keep it private for a few more years, which market you might head to and so forth.
We've certainly received a fair bit of inbound discussion about this. There's a lot of interest in this business. I personally think this is going to be a phenomenal business in the longer term. It is unique in its nature. It has a very large regulatory moat around it. It is unique in its offering in terms of it can handle large transactions, which other payment systems can't do, and complex transactions. It allows, for the first time, people to buy and sell things like houses online, cars online, oil wells online, jewelry, import and export of shipping containers, as opposed to letters of credit and so forth. This is going to be unicorn, unquestionably. It's going to be, I think, much bigger than a billion-dollar business in time.
I think the window where we can start thinking about these things is now, and certainly there's a lot of investors approaching us wanting to have discussions about this. There's a question of ultimately which market it will end up on. I think for me, there are three different markets it could potentially end up on as a listed business. The easiest to list and the closest market would be the Australian market. I think the window of opportunity for it to get to the Australian market, if we were to consider that route, basically it's open for consideration now, and towards the end of next year would look exactly like Freelancer looked in terms of the scale of the business. Well, very roughly similar.
Post that, we could consider the U.K. stock market because that's where you've got Worldpay, Adyen, GlobalCollect, et cetera, and a number of payments businesses. It is a bit of a home for payments businesses. Ultimately, you've got the U.S. markets where you'd probably want to be doing $ 100 million in revenue before thinking of going there, although there are many exceptions. That is a market where you might want to think about staying private a little bit longer before you go there. There's thinking around all those three markets. That thinking has commenced already. We have investors who are pitching us things at this point for different routes, including keeping it private for a bit longer. We're just thinking about these things at this point. There's been no decisions made.
It's just the optionality is there, and I think that the benchmark you can think about is towards the end of next year, kind of looks roughly, in terms of parameters, a bit like Freelancer looked. You can draw back to thinking about that. Also it's in a really hot market. It's also very unique, and it has a massive moat. The markets now are significantly hotter, I would say, than they were in 2013. 2013 was when technology was eating the world, and they were hot, but now they're in overdrive. There are higher valuations being paid. There are higher multiples in the stock markets. There are bigger deals being done in the venture space. There are bigger valuations being paid in the venture space. It's a more attractive situation today than it was in 2013 from a company's perspective. Any further questions?
Alex has just asked a question. Freelancer's user obligations often exceed Freelancer's cash balance. Is Freelancer using customer money to fund those users who are using cash balances to fund?
Yeah. The question about cash balances, which I'll probably pass off to Neil Katz from Alex, which is about Freelancer's user obligations are often higher than the cash balances. Why is that the case? Effectively, are we using sometimes negative working capital to fund the business? Is there a way of getting you a microphone so you can answer the question?
Hi. Yes, we do sometimes use negative working capital. We've been running this business for so long. We know the cash flow trends, and we know the way our user obligations work in terms of the timing of when payouts are required. Some of our user obligations, even though they all reflect as current liabilities, we know that there's a percentage of those that are more longer term in nature. The cash flows are quite predictable from our perspective. We feel pretty comfortable at the levels that we run that ratio of user balances to cash. We expect to integrate profitability quite soon, hopefully. We're at that close to break-even point. As Matt says, it's not going to take very long for us to replenish those cash balances quite quickly in the near term.
Yeah. Freelancer.com is a business, correct me if I'm wrong, Neil, it was profitable in Q2 of last year, Q3 of last year and Q4 of last year. Is that right?
Yes.
It was slightly negative in this half. It's a Freelancer business.
Yeah.
The Escrow was profitable in the third quarter of last year, fourth quarter of last year, first quarter of this year, and second quarter of this year.
Yeah. Well, if you look at our segment, reporting in our half-year report, the escrow division was actually very profitable in the first half of the year. The Freelancer made a loss. We're quite confident that we're able to get that close to break-even and profitable in the near term. It's not going to take that much. Just a small increase in revenue will turn it around quite quickly.
Next question. I will say, there was a question about quarantine of balances. The escrow business does quarantine user obligations. They're actually in trust or in escrow around the place. That's a regulated environment. In California, our Freelancer payments are in the escrow environment, in a regulated environment, which are quarantined. yeah, there's another $41 million of quarantined cash off balance sheet. Chris?
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Okay, I'll open it up for a little bit longer for further questions. Sometimes people are a bit shy before they want to ask a question. We've got everyone here, and if you want to ask a question, you can, or if you want to do it privately, you can email investor@freelancer.com and speak to any of us privately, including the management team. I know some investors like to do that, whether it's talk to Jackson about escrow or Tom about freight or Sean about enterprise. I forgot to mention Sean McMeekin's on the call. You can talk to him about enterprise sales. Neil about financials or Adam about product. Any other questions for now?
Ray asked, any comment on the significant drop in share price in the last few days?
Ray asked, any comment about the significant drop in share price in the last few days? The share price has a mind of its own. If I knew how it worked, it would be great. Sometimes things are going well, it goes down. Sometimes things are going not so well, it goes up. It's a tightly held stock. It's about 23% free float. In the practical level of free float, it's probably a bit less than that because there's some long-term investors there that have been accumulating shares for some time. Very little news can move the share price up or down a lot. I've seen before the share price move up by 50% in two days. On the back of a positive but a fairly small announcement. It can get knocked around up or down. It is a volatile stock.
I think in the long term, that's going to play in our favor. In the long term, if you think about the business at a very high level, last year we did AUD 892 million through the bank accounts. This year should be over AUD 1 billion . We're breaking profitability, and we're in the broad areas of payments, freight, and labor. We have marquee businesses with all three. Freelancer, we're the largest online workforce globally for freelance talent. It's very strategic. For escrow, it basically is the only online multi-jurisdictional escrow company globally that allows payments above a few thousand dollars, and it's going to your eBays and your Shopifys and so forth around the world. In terms of freight, Tom now runs the largest Australian freight marketplace by a long way.
More freight on the average day is posted in these marketplaces than the distance from the Earth to the Moon. This is a pretty amazing business with three real gems of assets. I didn't talk about Freightlancer in terms of the corporate side of that, at some point, that will be a public company as well. I think it's going to have even faster revenue growth than Escrow.com. This is going to really knock the lights out because we've got the distribution already. We've got the jobs already. The loads are already being posted. There's $300 million of loads being posted every year on the platform. If you think about the share price, well, what's going to happen in the natural evolution of the group? The group at some point will get index inclusion.
At some point, it will go probably most likely into S&P/ASX 300 first. At that point, every fund manager in the country will have to own the stock. The tightly held business, in terms of the shares, means that it's going to be very hard for every fund manager to get set. At that point, when finally there's realization around the true potential of this business, and the business becomes, in my mind, properly valued, there's going to be a scramble for the stock. I think that's when you're going to see the tightly held nature of the stock really take off. The other thing that's going to happen as well in the short term is we've just become traded in the U.S. on OTC Best Markets. We're out under the best category of OTC Best Markets, which is QX. That's a top tier.
That's where Fortescue is. There's a bunch of other companies that have just recently gone OTC, and there's Adriatic Metals, which is a bit of a market darling at the moment in the precious metals space. They've just gone OTCQX. The next step from there is DTC, which is basically electronic trading. At the moment, even though we're tradable in the U.S. on the ticker FLNCF, we're not actually visible on platforms like Interactive Brokers. We will become visible as soon as DTC goes through, which is a bit of an archaic process, but it should happen in the next two months. At that point, for the very first time, we'll actually appear on the U.S. share trading platforms. Our customers and our shareholders and potential investors will be able to purchase a stock without having to get an ASX share trading account.
It's a lot easier in countries like India to trade U.S. stocks on the U.S. OTCQX than it is in Australian-listed stocks. We have a lot of customers, 53 million, 54 million customers, and a whole bunch of them I know want to buy shares in Freelancer. At the moment they can't, because they can't get an ASX share trading account open. The minute we go DTC, they will be available in those regions. I think we're going to get some support from our customer base. I think, again, it's going to play in our favor at that point. Any other questions?
There is a question on the brand name, Escrow.com. Which payment gateway domain names, watches, cars, et cetera, within Escrow.com.
I'll read it out so people can hear it. Alex asks again, which payment gateway, domain names, watches, cars, et cetera, within Escrow.com are you most excited about in the next 5 to 10 years? Let's ask that question first. I'll pass this over to Jackson to answer that one. Which category of Escrow.com are you most excited about?
Thanks, Matt. The first part to say is that the size of transactions online is growing year-on-year. Those top end of transactions in 2005, no one would even think about buying a car online. Now, the place that people start looking for their next car is online. I'm excited to see where that trend goes in the next 10 years. We're right now transacting oil fields online. The sky is the limit. I'm very excited to see what will happen with our partnership with Energy Domain and as we expand into oil and gas. Of course, that naturally lends itself into discussions around real estate, which again, is going to be a very big vertical for us in the future.
Yeah. If you ask the question for myself, I think automotive is pretty exciting for me. We're in eBay Motors, we're in Classic Cars, we're in Hagerty, we're in AutoHunter, we're in Where else are we in, Jackson? You're in the thick of it.
Yep. Best Car Finder. Look, the point about the automotive market is every customer is looking for a safe transaction. The sellers are looking for a safe place to sell. Buyers are looking for their dream car, and they definitely don't want to run into a scam. Escrow.com is a great fit for automotive marketplaces and frankly, as we're seeing more and more adoption, the pace just picks up month on month, both for inbound and for our sales team.
Yeah. It's a great question. There was a follow-up question, which I think was, what is the most important thing you can do to enhance Escrow.com's moat? Maybe I'll answer that from my perspective, and then maybe Jackson, you can answer it from your perspective. The first thing I'll say is, I think there's a massive regulatory moat. If I wanted to start this business again and I could take the best people in the company, I could take Jackson and Neil and Adam and so forth, and Sean and so forth, and let's really start this whole business all over again, I couldn't do it. Right? This is a business that only exists because it was started by Fidelity. SoftBank put $30 million into it, had 250 staff back in 1999.
It actually IPO'd as a business unit of Fidelity, with some other business units in 2000, and it spun back in 2001, approximately. It's been going for 20 years. To operate in the U.S., there's 50 states. There's state-by-state licensing. Four states don't require it, six territories. 52 licenses are needed to operate in the U.S. These states, to get licensed state by state by state takes years to get engaged with them. In some circumstances, five years. You need to be bonded in each state with multimillion-dollar bonds. They've got different rules. In California, you've got to have an escrow manager that's licensed, sitting in an office, who hits a button every week to let payments go out, or every day. In Washington, you have to have a separate trust account.
In Arizona, you've got to offer interest to the customer, even though the other states expressly forbid taking and offering interest. It's all very complicated. The rules are all conflicting. It is extremely cumbersome. On average, we're audited every two years by a regulator. We're not just regulated in the U.S., but in Canada, Australia, and soon to be the U.K., imminently in the U.K. We're perpetually in audit. The funds sit off-balance sheet in trust. This is a very, very difficult business to get going and exists because the regulatory environment. It makes it so hard because of the regulatory environment and because Fidelity ran it for a decade and put a lot of money into it with SoftBank, et cetera, is the only reason it exists. That moat is huge.
The more we get regulated around the world, licensed around the world, the bigger the moat. Regulators around the world are forming a view that marketplaces can no longer take payments and put them on the balance sheet. In Europe, under the Payment Services Directive 2, this is the case. In California, the Department of Business Oversight, which has now been renamed, I keep getting this wrong. I got wrong this morning, Jackson. It's DFPI.
Correct.
Department of Financial Protection and Innovation.
Correct.
Got the innovation bit right. They've formed a view that if you hold money for the provision of a service, it's escrow. They wrote a letter to Airbnb and said, Cease and desist. They wrote a letter to Fiverr and said, Cease and desist. They wrote a letter to 99designs and said, Cease and desist. They wrote a letter to DesignCrowd and said, Cease and desist. They wrote a letter to Freelancer and said, Cease and desist. We said, well, it's okay. We actually have to know it for escrow. We'll put it through escrow. We put our California payments through escrow. Airbnb had the financial resources to go and try and get regulated in every single state, and they went and spent that. Millions and millions and millions of dollars, and took them a very, very long time.
They could go along and talk to Jackson and pay 50 basis points, 60 basis points. What would you offer Airbnb? Something like that, probably.
I'll let you know as soon as I talk to them.
15% of the volume, right? From my perspective, increasing the regulators are forming a view that you're going to have to go towards an escrow business and actually insisting on it, and I think that regulatory moat is huge. Jackson, you probably have plenty of other moats you can think of.
Yeah, absolutely. The first thing to say is that Escrow.com right now, today, is the most licensed online escrow company in the world. That regulatory moat in terms of acquisition of licenses is well-formed. We can always extend that, and the question is, well, how would we extend it? The answer is through volume and through category specialization. Additional categories require certain additional licenses. We're always open to acquiring those and developing out the deepness of our relationships with regulators. I'm always open to hearing about new license classes that we can enter. Primarily, the answer to that is volume. The more volume we are doing in each one of these states, in each one of these territories, the more well-known we are to those regulators, and the easier it is for us to be on the right side of those regulations.
As we grow and mature as a business, I expect to enter additional license classes and deepen our relationships with all of our regulators.
I also think we build a moat as we get integrated in places like eBay Motors and so forth. Why would you integrate a second payment system if it existed? They don't exist. I don't even know of an escrow business with two licenses. Do you, Jackson?
None that jump to mind. Primarily, most escrow businesses are geographically located in just one state. Multi-jurisdictional is extremely rare.
Okay, next question is probably for Adam, which you can give the microphone, is what's the main thing restricting Freelancer.com's growth? Just passing the microphone to Adam right now.
Apologies. In terms of revenue growth, the number one drag right now on Freelancer is the memberships. I believe we've given a bit of talk in the commentary, but I'm happy to cover that now. The primary reason behind this drag is we basically made a big effort in the beginning of the year and late last year and throughout last year, actually, to reduce the amount of spammy bids in the marketplace. When you speak to our customers, their number one, I believe it's at least in the top three complaints, is that our bids are a little bit spammy. There's a bunch of reasons for that. We do offer a lot of bids on high-end plans to freelancers, and an effective bidding strategy in some cases is just copy and paste.
Anyway, we made a concerted effort to eliminate that spam or at least reduce it. Unfortunately, like I sort of alluded to earlier, one of the big benefits of our high-end plans and mid-tier and high-end plans is basically the amount of bids on offer. By reducing the install, creating penalties for spamming, we actually inadvertently devalued the primary benefit that our mid and top-end plans offer. I still believe this is a positive net impact on the marketplace despite the aforementioned revenue loss. It really did clean out the bids and address a major customer complaint. The strategy moving forward is basically three-pronged. The first of these prongs is to deprecate the lowest level plan, the intro plan. That plan costs $ 1 a month and frankly, does not deliver a lot of value to our customers.
We're going to deprecate that and move those users onto Basic, which is $5 a month. We'll make a bit of extra revenue from that. On top of that, I think we'll deliver a lot more value to the freelancers. The second prong in this approach is just to add a lot more benefits to these mid and high-end plans that are not just bids. We've already released one of these, which is the Bid Insights feature, which provides freelancers doing volume bidding with a lot more analytics into their bids, how much the employers rate their bids. Do they rate them highly, poorly? How quick do employers look at their bid? All these kind of stats, apps like this, which freelancers value quite a lot. We did see some revenue uplift on this.
There's still obviously a lot more work to be done to diversify the benefits of these plans and create a lot more value in them, that it's not just bids. The final prong in this strategy is obviously to release new plans and new lines of business. The big one there is we actually have an existing plan called Corporate, and we're going to expand that fairly dramatically with a new set of features. We'll talk more about that in the future. That should lead to some significant revenue growth.
There's more discussion around that in the video from the half year results from yesterday. If you'd like a copy of that, just please email investor@freelancer.com and we'll send you a copy of that from yesterday. There's a lot of discussion about it in the Q&A. Any other questions? I think there's a question from Ray about the prospect of dividends versus strategy development and spinoffs. We're not thinking about dividends at this point in time. As I said before, when you've got breakeven profitability and you've got big numbers going through the bank accounts, a billion dollars a year plus going through the bank accounts, and the revenue number where the revenue number is, any incremental jump in that revenue number has to be soaked up somewhere, otherwise it accidentally makes profits.
There's no CapEx in this business, it's only OpEx, and the OpEx is headcount. You can see the headcount numbers is up 13.5% on the year. That was a 13% increase in headcount to 465 staff. There was a decrease in marketing expenditure with the new predictive model. That will increase a little bit in the third quarter and the second half. You can see that if that revenue number goes up by an extra AUD 20 million, where's that AUD 20 million going to go? You might increase the marketing, trying a few new things. You might increase the headcount by a certain amount, but you're not going to double the headcount, right? It's got to go somewhere. One thing we've done well in this business is we don't dilute the shareholders.
We don't do excessive capital raisings, capital raise after capital raise after capital raise. We raised some money pre-IPO to buy a business, never raised any operating capital, took, I think it was some, I can't remember exactly what the number was. It was two and a half or one and a half. I can't remember what the number was, we raised about that quantity to buy a website, that was it. We took it public, it opened on the market on the first day, over $1 billion , in the hundreds of millions it's been since. There was no other money raised prior to IPO, post-IPO. There was a small amount of money possible raised at the IPO, there was one other capital raise, which was to buy Escrow.com.
We ended up paying $7.1 million for Escrow.com, and in my belief, it's going to turn to at least a billion-dollar business. We don't dilute the shareholders unnecessarily, and we create great value for shareholders. At some point, there's going to be excess profits. We're going to figure out what we have to do with them. For now, it's basically building the three businesses we have now. I think we've got in a good position now where all three can really stand on their own two feet and become big businesses. That's what the focus is now, is operation. Next question is, do you still love running the business? Do you still see yourself running it in 10 years' time? If the shareholders will let me, yes, I'll stay running it in 10 years' time. I love the business.
I was up at 1:00 A.M. this morning talking to investors overseas, between 1:00 A.M. and 2:00 A.M. I spoke to some investors today, actually for too long. I was on my phone with someone for two and a half hours, and Adam and Neil were saying, we better hurry along to the AGM, but I love what I do. I spend all my time working on this. I don't really have much of a life outside of Freelancer, and I think it's exciting. I think there's a long way to go. For me, I want to build this into a very large company. That's the challenge. Extremely large company, and do some amazing things and transform not just the world of work, but the world of international trade and the world of freight.
I think the businesses are pretty amazing in how they fit together, and we're building the next Amazon on a shoestring budget. We got a long way to go to get to Amazon level, we're giving it our best shot. Any other final questions before we wrap up for the day? Okay. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Again, if you want the transcript of yesterday's half year results, you got a video of that, please email investor@freelancer.com. You can also email us for one-on-ones. Otherwise, I look forward to talking to you in the future, and thank you for joining the first half of 2021 financial results presentation.