Burson-Marsteller, The Aspen Institute and Time Magazine released survey results last week on the sharing/gig/on-demand economy.
Time's Exclusive: See How Big the Gig Economy Really Is covers the study results, which indicate the gig economy is quite big. Key quote:
44% of U.S. adults have participated in such transactions, playing the roles of lenders and borrowers, drivers and riders, hosts and guests. The number this represents, more than 90 million people, is greater than the number of Americans who identify, respectively, as Republicans or Democrats.
They also found that 22% of Americans - 45 million - work in the sharing/gig/on-demand economy. Key quote from the study press release:
“With nearly a quarter of Americans already working in the On-Demand Economy, and more than a third buying its services, it is clear the sector is playing a major role in the growth and direction of the United States.
These are much bigger numbers than have been found by other studies looking at the number of people working in the sharing/on-demand/gig economy.
For example, we worked with Intuit on a similar study and found that about 3.2 million Americans are working in the online on-demand economy.
Another recent study, developed for the Brookings Institute and led by noted economists Seth Harris and Alan Krueger, found that about 600,000 Americans work in the online sharing/gig/on-demand economy.
So the numbers range from 600,000 to 45 million.
And keep in mind these numbers are just for those working in the online sharing/gig/on-demand economy - meaning they work with online platforms such as Uber, Lyft and Airbnb.
They exclude the many millions of people who are gig/freelance workers but aren't using these platforms.
So what's going on?
The answer is likely differences in how the sharing/gig/on-demand economy is defined coupled with different study methodologies.
We've had a chance to dig through the Brookings study and the key difference between their study and ours is they have a tighter definition of the online gig economy than we do. They only include those providing personal services in their definition while we include those providing on-demand business services and independent workers providing on-demand products.
When we rerun our data with the Brookings definition, we also get numbers in the 600,000 range. So these two studies have reasonably consistent results, once you adjust for the differences in definitions.
We don't yet have enough information on the Time/Aspen study to explain how they got such big numbers. But we're digging into it and will report what we find in the near future.
For more on the Time/Aspen study see their results slide deck.
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