The "gig economy," popularised by the likes of Uber and Airbnb, has for years been promoted as an effective way for people to make money on their own terms. But new data show that the majority of workers - 85 per cent of them - make less than US$500 a month, on average, using those services.
The home-sharing site Airbnb yielded the highest monthly return to its users, with a median income of US$440, more than double the US$210 a month earned by the median Lyft driver, according to San Francisco-based loan provider Earnest, which analysed tens of thousands of loan applications to study the impact of gig-economy jobs. (Earnings on other popular platforms included a monthly median of US$40 on craft-selling site Etsy, US$70 on delivery app Postmates, US$110 on services marketplace TaskRabbit and US$155 on ride-sharing app Uber.)
"We're starting to see that these gigs are filling in the gaps for a lot of people - a little bit of extra money here for a student loan payment, or a few hours of work there to create additional income," said Catherine New, a senior editor at Earnest. "But bigger picture, you also see that people are having to work two or three jobs to make ends meet."
Nearly one in four Americans now earns money from the digital "platform economy," according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. And increasingly, their experiences - and their earnings - are split between those who are supplementing their incomes with side gigs, and those who rely on those piecemeal earnings to eke out a living.
There are "profound differences" in the ways people use the gig-economy, says Aaron Smith, associate director of research on Internet and technology issues at Pew.