According to the Direct Selling Association (DSA), 20.5 million Americans were involved in direct selling in 2016.
Of those, 5.3 million are what the DSA calls "business builders". These are people actively managing and selling products to a customer base (think Avon, Mary Kay, etc.).
While the other 15.2 million may do some selling, they are mostly involved to get the product discounts that come with signing up as a seller.
The 2016 Intuit On-Demand Workforce study found that about 3.9 million Americans work for online on-demand platforms and marketplaces like Uber, Lyft and Upwork.
So direct selling employs more Americans than the online platforms and marketplaces.
Direct selling, also called multi-level marketing, is obviously not new - as the Avon ad from the early 1960's below shows.
Like online on-demand work, direct selling provides a low friction, highly flexible way to earn supplemental income.
And also like on-demand work, most direct sellers are part-time (85%) with their main motivations being supplemental income and the work flexibility direct selling provides.
The one major difference between those working as direct sellers versus those working for on-demand platforms is demographic. 74% of direct sellers are women, while only about 44% of those working in the online, on-demand economy are.
The main reason for this is many of the products sold by direct sellers are targeted at women. This goes back to the early days of the direct selling industry in the late 1950's and early 60's. At that time the industry specifically targeted women as the market and women as sellers.
They did this because it was believed men would be too busy with full-time jobs to be good sellers. Also, because they weren't home during the day, the industry believed men wouldn't be a good market for products sold via direct sellers.
These views are now out of date, but most direct selling companies continue to target women.
And they continue to stress work flexibility as key reason to be a direct seller. The video clip below, from Austin's KUVE television station, nicely explains the appeal of direct selling for those caring for kids.
The direct selling industry long ago discovered there is demand for highly flexible, low friction work. But to participate in direct selling you need to have the skills, interest and willingness to be a salesperson.
Obviously many people do not have these, but still have the need for highly flexible work.
The on-demand gig economy platforms like Uber, Lyft and others figured this out.
We often read about or hear that Uber and the other online on-demand platforms invented the gig economy.
As we pointed out in our post Uber Didn't Create the Gig Economy, the Gig Economy Created Uber, this view is not correct.
The need for highly flexible, low friction work has been around probably as long as work has. New technologies allowed the platforms to tap into this need.
Disclosure: Intuit is an Emergent Research (that's us) client.
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