Ontario’s London Free Press called them “voice-over matchmakers”.
Back in 2003, David and Stephanie Ciccarelli created Voices.com out of their condo. At the time this blog was published in 2009, they had eight full-time staff and four computer developers on contract. David estimated about $11 million of business goes through the site annually.
If you’ve ever used their services, you know that Voices.com makes money from your subscription fees and from an optional 10% SurePay escrow fee on top of whatever the talent’s fee is, paid by the voice-seeker. According to the site:
“this Escrow fee is kept by Voices.com to cover the charges that we incur from holding the deposit for a period of time in a secure third party account”.
Stephanie Ciccarelli summarized my unease regarding audition submissions as follows:
“You’ve noted that many people are concerned to see that some of the past jobs they’ve auditioned for months ago have not yet progressed to awarding a talent, leaving them to wonder if a client is merely window-shopping or kicking tires, possibly also wondering if auditioning online is a waste of time.”
“According to a snapshot of statistics from the last four months (April 2009 through July 2009) tracking the completion rate of jobs posted at Voices.com, we can confirm that at any given stage, half of the open jobs are still being reviewed by their client and the other half are completed (that means a talent has been chosen), with over 2/3 of those completed jobs being verified and processed via SurePay.
Although this information is reassuring, we are aware that there is still room to improve and to grow.”
Stephanie cites a number of reasons as to why it appears that many voice-seekers on her site never seem to select a candidate. Allow me to paraphrase:
- Some clients, regardless of their deadlines for finding talent, may not have a pressing need to have their voice over recorded instantly. In other words: they file away the auditions until they are ready to hire. Sometimes this could take many months, but eventually, someone gets the job.
- Some clients use sites like voices.com, to find talent and they prefer to work with them off-site, leaving their job in an “Open” status (see the story of the Taylor family in my last blog). This explains why there are fewer “completed” jobs than there truly are.
- Some voice talents and/or voice seekers don’t want to use the SurePay system. If that’s the case, the job won’t be registered as completed.
VOICE-SEEKERS’ PERSPECTIVE
So far we’ve heard the story from the perspective of a voice talent and from representatives of several pay-to-play sites. Be sure to check out Voice123 Steven Lowell’s comments on my previous blog. What do voice-seekers make of all this?
A former casting director for a nationally known ad agency gave me permission to share his (or her) thoughts as long as he/she would remain anonymous.
“Agencies will do a lot of casting for projects they “hope” will become a client. They will hold auditions and actors will hold their breath (after creatives fawn all over them), expect a hold or booking….alas: no call! Of course it happens that another is booked, but it does also happen that no one is booked as the agency did not get the account or budget was cut.
It also happens that an audition is used as a demo in pitch for the account and the performer never knows about it. Top brass may not even know this practice is going on at his or her agency. The Head of production is calling the shots without others in chain of command knowing anything about you (performer) being screwed. You may have been instrumental in getting an account. When time came to cast for account, you may be forgotten for a more high profile talent.
I protested this practice (to the shock of the production chief), but it was an uphill battle to have any effect on this practice I did make some headway. In short: we don’t have many options in regard to this practice. Many agencies or agents don’t participate in this practice, but it does happen.”
ISSUE RESOLVED?
There you have it. Were these answers satisfying to you? Were my initial concerns justified or were they a tempest in a teapot? Do you feel that the major pay-to-play sites offer enough accountability and transparency? Even though they’re not our personal agents, we are paying them to provide a service, so we should have some say in how our money is spent. What suggestions do you have regarding this issue?
Please keep in mind that I am looking for constructive ideas. It’s always easy to blame someone or something else for our own lack of success. However, there are so many things we can do to increase our chances of being spotted and hired. We should never completely rely on these sites to bring in all the work.
As you have noticed, sites like voice123, voplanet and voices.com seem to be listening to us, and they don’t shy away from controversial topics. They are following up with job seekers, and they too have to work with ad agencies that are only using their service to test the waters.
And finally: as every matchmaker knows, no matter how carefully you select two interested parties, not every match ends in matrimony!
Paul Strikwerda ©nethervoice.com
PS Since this article was published, many things have changed. I advise my readers to stay away from voices dot com because of highly unethical business practices.
Sorry, I am an optimistic person with a positive attitude in most situations, but there IS a black hole here, on a couple of levels.
I’m a radio vet with 20+ years experience, major markets, known voice, wanted to make some extra cash with VO’s. When I first joined voices.com in 2007, I became a premium member via a special discount offer they had for a limited period. There were two tiers of membership then: Premium, and the free one. Of course, the main promise of Premium membership was that your profile and voice would be visible to clients before the free members were. Premium was the top tier, and I booked 3 or 4 jobs in fairly rapid succession in my first month. I thought, great, piece of cake.
Within a few months of my joining, voices.com offered up their new, exclusive “Platinum” membership. This cost ten times more per year than what I already paid (my “special” rate was 100 bucks a year for two years, the Platinum was 1000 per year). The “platinum” members suddenly became first tier as “Talents”, and I was relegated to mere “people” status. When my bookings fell to exactly zero that month, they stayed there, despite my auditioning for dozens and dozens of jobs. The sound of crickets chirping became the dominant noise from my inbox. I have not made a single booking on voices.com since mid 2008, despite gussying up my page and putting in more demos as the nice folks there suggested (they are nice), and submitting what are certainly more than 100 auditions.
I was told by another VO friend that all these sites actually have limits now, that they DON’T tell the talents about. She said that voices.com actually stops sending clients auditions after the first 50 submitted, so as not to “overwhelm” them because the number of auditioners has grown exponentially. So any sent after those first fifty make it in do indeed fall into a black hole, and are never even put before the client. I would love to hear some confirmation or denial of this from anyone else. My friend also said the only way to ever book a job is to hover over the site at 6AM or something and immediately race to complete auditions QUICK as SOON as they post, and if you’re lucky you’ll slip under the wire and be among those first fifty. But you have to somehow know when that magic time to hover is, as they won’t post it.
So it seems to me to be double jeopardy here for folks like me, double dutch. Thats why I’m glad to have a REAL agent now. Decades ago, I was told that anyone that makes you pay up front for representation is b*******. That may not have been the case when voices.com hit the market, but thats sure what I’m smelling now, unfortunately.
Again, I would love to hear anyone else comment on this. And thank you for this forum, by the way.
Best,
Richard
Hi Richard- It was good to see that you recognize the value of a good old fashioned talent agent!Those who actually get to agent, provide input on projects and negotiate on your behalf. As the P2P sites continue to encourage more and more folks to enter the voiceover fray (for obvious reasons), the effectiveness and efficiency of these sites for the buyer is diluted. I see them longing for and returning to the folks that can provide relationship, customer service, knowledge and experience.
There’s no reason these pay-to-play sites cannot to provide an indication that ***voice seeker xyz has posted 500 auditions/5 were awarded to one of our pay-to-play participants***
Maybe they do not collect that data now or currently have a method to collect that data (which seems to be a mind-boggling oversight bordering on incompetence), but if they don’t have that data or a method to collect it, they need to develop a method to gather that data to properly serve their paying customers.
Because my day job is working for a company that specializes in data collection and analysis, I know that we’d consider developing such a method trivial – within certain parameters of reliability. The people auditioning deserve to know the track records of the people they make auditions for….
BTW – AFTRA/SAG still has a rate for doing demos. AFTRA/SAG talent are not supposed to be doing demos for free.
Richard,
I spent a few months on Voice123 and although I booked a couple of small jobs (each of which has since come back for additional work, I’m happy to add) the restrictions/rules associated with their “voicecaster” automated software drove me crazy. But they at least do overtly limit the number of auditions accepted for a given project.
Voices.com scares me with their auditions received statistic (often over 200!) But last week I was selected for a decent job, and on the job’s “Overview” page, it showed I was audition 87/147. So at least anecdotally, I can say it looks like you can be more than 50 and still get heard.
Paul, GREAT BLOG.
Too many of us creative types really do pretend this is not a business and, in many ways, a numbers game. Here’s the number I’ve been afraid to calculate for myself, but Richard’s reference to 100 auditions and your recent post about auditions lost in cyberspace move moe closer to calculating it:
{(Dollars earned in VO)-[(Dollars spent on membership sites)+(Dollars spent in escrow fees, etc.)]
DIVIDED BY
[(Hours Spent Searching for Jobs)+(Hours Spent Auditioning)+(Hours Spent Working)]
As the economy has soured, I’ve found myself trying to maintain my earning level by working more and more hours – and I include the project search in those hours. I’m just afraid of what that final hourly income figure might be!
Keep up the great work.
Hi Ray:
Thank you so much for putting your two cents in! You should start writing a blog yourself!
You’re absolutely right: too many colleagues aren’t treating their profession as a business, but they’re not the only artists making that mistake. I know voice-over talents who spend most of their days chasing after $100 gigs from pay-to-play sites while they’re neglecting their own marketing. You did give them some hope, though, and it’s good to hear that it’s still possible to land a job, even if you’re audition is at the back of the line.
Stay in touch with Double Dutch!