Very low pay for external contracts?

[FurysFlight]

Dear community. I am relatively new to ETS2 - only 90 playing hours in - but have met a bit of a problem. I really would like to get started driving External Contracts. But when I browse the Freight Market and the External Contracts market the best available Freight Market jobs always gives way more and often around two times the reward per kilometer (30-60 euro) as the External Contracts (20-30 euro). Is this on purpose, or is there a bug in my game? And if there is a problem, how do I fix it?

/Fury

[Tigre de Poche]

I just know external contracts can't be just-in-time jobs, so that's already one bonus off.

[The Pitts]

It isn't really a fair comparison. The Freight Market includes hundreds of jobs that you could not possibly perform (because they are too far away) whereas the External Market jobs are those within immediate striking distance. Equally the FM jobs are always there until they expire (you are the only person that can possibly take those jobs) whereas the WoT jobs are open to everyone logged in and therefore the more lucrative ones tend to exist for only a short period of time before someone snaps them up. A more reasonable comparison would be to select the closest city when in the Freight Market and look at only the rates of those jobs.

The highest paying jobs, by price per km, will nearly always be Freight Market jobs however, because those will likely be urgent, which is not a thing with the online jobs (because they use real world time rather than game world time). However, that metric is not the only one by which to judge the jobs (and beware of jobs that involve a lot of sitting on a ferry, because those look good by that measure but involve a lot of time during which you're not generating XP whilst the in game clock is ticking) - you might want to haul particular cargoes, or from or to particular depots or cities rather than purely worrying about the cash.

[FurysFlight]

Thank you for the perspective Tigre de Poche. Valuable observations!