Nearly a decade after the founding of Uber and Airbnb it’s still hard to get a handle on the size and importance of either those particular platforms or the larger “gig economy.”[1]
On the one hand, the rise of Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb has generated so much controversy about online talent platforms, the changing nature of work, and workers’ rights that it has at times been hard to get a clear fix on the sector and its meaning.[2]
On the other hand, the sector’s size and growth has been difficult to clarify, because it has been difficult to measure. Government data-gathering, for example,
has not been well positioned to capture the gig economy, in part because it is conceptually complex and in part because the government stopped counting “contingent workplace” arrangements after 2005.[3]
Which means that no comprehensive database exists on either employment in the gig economy or its geography.
As a result, debates have flared over the true size and significance of the sector. Some skeptics, by way of aggregate self-employment statistics, conclude that “proof of the revolution…is hard to find.” Others have worked directly with platform company data or leveraged other proprietary information to assess the size and nature of online gigging. Overall, these national analyses have tended to describe a small but rapidly growing realm of platform-enabled freelancing. So far, though, the findings have yet to be extended to city-by-city estimates of growth or comparisons of activity across metro areas.
However, it turns out that for all of the limitations of the available data, additional light can in fact be thrown on the online gig economy. Specifically, insight can be gleaned—if one knows where to look for it—from an obscure Census Bureau dataset on “nonemployer firms,” which tracks the activity of “businesses” that earn at least $1,000 per year in gross revenues (or $1 in construction) but employ no workers.[4]
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