It is important to note that the rate at which downloads are increasing have gone up as well. According to ST, from 2019 to 2020, apps such as Uber, DoorDash and Lyft, all of which allow people to opt for gig work such as driving people around or delivering food on a payment-per-gig basis, saw a 20% increase in downloads. The increase from 2020 to 2021 is even more significant though, with a 25% increase being seen at this point in time.
The best performing company in this regard has been DoorDash, the food delivery company, which has seen almost twice as many installs this March as it did at the same time last year. Last March DoorDash got 431,000 downloads from gig workers, whereas the same number in March of 2021 is around 812,000.
Apart from delivery and ride sharing gig work, apps like Fiverr have seen a huge boost too. Fiverr’s user growth rate increased in 2020 and then stabilized with a small decline being seen towards the end of the year. Starting right almost immediately into 2021, though, Fiverr saw a massive spike in user growth rate, with the rate going from around 20% in 2020 to 40% in 2021.
This doubling of growth rates might also be impacted by the fact that a lot of people probably prefer gig work over anything else since it gives them the chance to work as much as they actually want to as opposed to being forced to work a set number of hours. This flexibility also enables people to obtain multiple secondary sources of income that can boost their finances and give them the chance to actually save some money in the long run.
This trend might continue to grow in the coming years, and it has the potential to create real paradigm shift that could change the way people think about work in the first place. Many companies might want to take advantage of this by opting for hiring gig workers themselves, though globally the employee rights of gig workers is a pretty contentious issue which might impede the growth of the industry in the short term and possibly boost it in the long term since gig work will turn into a much better and more secure way of earning money. Either way it will be quite interesting to see where things go from here since the growth rate of gig workers doesn’t seem to be decreasing anytime soon.
