I work as a freelancer rather than full-timing for anyone and have found that, while I see very little that specifically asks for Perl, I get favorable responses far more often than not when I respond to a PHP project with "this bid is for creation of Perl code that will do everything you want (and frequently more)". It works fairly well with other languages, too, but the vast majority of the stuff I've run across that is naturally suited to Perl, but requests another language, tends to be requesting PHP. (And I don't mean to suggest the "Perl is a web language" fallacy here - one of my current projects was originally looking for some PHP scripts to run from cron, which is just silly.)

Obviously, I don't waste my time on that if it's something to be tightly integrated into an existing $other_language system, but a lot of people just heard somewhere that PHP/C/whatever is good and/or popular and request it without considering that something else (like, say, Perl) might be a better fit for what they want to achieve.