Are There More Gig Walkers Than Uber Drivers?

When most people hear the term "gig economy, they think of Uber. But Uber is hardly the only gig economy company.

In fact, it may not even be the largest, at least in terms of the number of independent workers using its platform.

According to a recent GigWalk press release:

"Gigwalk’s Cloud Market solution instantly connects businesses to a network of over one million Gigwalkers in North America …"

GigWalk's gig walkers are mobile independent workers who execute a variety of tasks for GigWalk clients.

Most of these are retail related, like checking to see promotional materials are properly displayed and acting as "secret shoppers". 

And as the map above (click to enlarge) shows, gig walkers are everywhere people are in the U.S. 

Uber’s been cagey lately about their number of U.S. drivers, but it seems likely they too have around 1 million in North America.

Lyft, of course, also has a lot of drivers too.

But so does GigWalk competitor Survey.com.

They recently claimed they have 400,000 independent contractors on their platform. 

So it’s quite possible there are more independent contractors in the U.S. working for GigWalk and Survey.com than there are people driving for Lyft and Uber.

There are other less known sectors with large numbers of independent contractors.

According to the NY Times article Plugging Into the Gig Economy, From Home With a Headset, there are more than 100,000 call center agents who work as independent contractors through on-demand call center platforms.

Field service is another industry with lots of on-demand gig workers. Platforms like Field Nation, Work Market, OnForce (recently acquired by Work Market) and others claim to collectively have over 600,000 independent field service technicians working via their sites.

There's even a report on the Uberization of Field Service and a different study showing that 76% of organizations that use field service technicians use independent contractors.

So while there may not be as many independent field service technicians as there are ride share drivers, there are a lot of them.

The gig economy is happening in pretty much every economic sector and industry.

And in some sectors, it’s already quite large.