Digital Outsourcing Survey Report 2012

The Digital Outsourcing Survey Report 2012 is out and it reveals some very intersting trends that we wanted to share: Produced by Econsultancy , the creators of the authoritative 2008 survey, they polled 132  UK digital agencies in August 2012.

Their findings reveal that 57% of responding digital agencies are outsourcing work to freelancers, other agencies or to specialist digital production companies. ( We think that’s a low ball estimate)

Technical work is the most likely to be outsourced, with 66% of the respondents mentioning it, followed by HTML, CSS, and AJAX development (60%) and LAMP (PHP/MySQL) programming (54%).

Flash design seems to be hot, with 97% of the participant mentioning it as the most needed production skill, while the most outsourced service is mobile applications (64%), followed by video production and post-production (55%) .

Other frequently outsourced services are content management systems  (CMS) (47%), social network applications, games, search marketing and e-commerce systems, each with 36% of the mentions.

More than half of the work (53%) is outsourced to freelancers, and only 47% to other digital agencies, with 69% of the respondents saying that when they work with another agency they prefer a UK based one.

And here’s another morsel: 72% of a freelancers’ time is billable, and the typical mark-up of outsourced work by agencies is 38%. The report states that “The vast majority of agencies who currently outsource feel that it is very effective for their business, and most plan to grow their level of outsourcing over the next year.”

Compelling reading, if you can get it. 

(Source: Digital Outsourcing Survey Report 2012)