Interesting news for all you online-based freelancers out there: The most popular freelance jobs marketplace, Freelancer.com, has just became even bigger. The site has announced it acquired one of its smaller rivals, the Canadian-based outsourcing marketplace Scriptlance which was the fifth largest marketplace in the world.

Freelancer.com is stating that with the addition of Scriptlance’s more than 360,000 users, the site now has over 4 million users which is by far the most visited outsourcing online destination for either employers or freelancers. Freelancer.com is now even larger than two of its main competitors Elance and oDesk combined which have both suffered from a huge decline in traffic over the past few months.

Although Freelancer.com is pretty young in the outsourcing industry (founded in 2009), it managed to surpass all other freelance marketplaces and besides Scriptlance it also holds more popular web properties such as GetAFreelancer.com, EUFreelance.com, LimeExchange, Freelancer.co.uk, Freelancer.de and Webmaster-talk.com.

The acquisition of Scriptlance will reinforce Freelancer.com status as the industry leader and more importantly, it will grant the company another foothold on the international arena- Scriptlance is active in over 240 world regions and popular in many Western countries such as Portugal, Ireland, Australia, Canada, Romania, Belgium, the U.K. and Netherlands.

Scriptlance was founded in 2001 by Rene Trescases in Canada and was one of the firsts on the virtual space which offered outsourcing services. Even though other freelance services like Guru, Elance, oDesk and of course Freelancer.com eventually grew bigger, Scriptlance remained one of the leading freelance marketplaces. Here’s what Scriptlance founder Rene Trescases had to say about the acquisition:

We’re thrilled to be joining forces with the global leader in the space. Selling to Freelancer made a lot of sense for us- they have the number one brand and the best scale and geographic reach of anyone in the industry.

If you have an account on Scriptlance, it will be transferred automatically to Freelancer.com including all your information, projects and balance. In addition, Scriptlance’s current employers and freelancers will receive some free premium membership perks to smooth their move.