68
McKinsey Global Institute
3. How independent work may evolve in the future
Consider the pace of Uber’s growth. Founded just seven years ago, the company doubled
the number of rides it handled daily from one million in 2014 to two million in 2015, enlisting
some 160,000 active drivers in the United States by the end of 2014.
57
Airbnb, another breakout platform, has grown to include some two million listings
worldwide. In the summer of 2010, approximately 47,000 guests stayed in Airbnb
properties—and by the summer of 2015, that number was 353 times larger, at nearly
17 million guests.
58
Today some 650,000 hosts worldwide operate on the platform, and
more than 60 million guests have stayed in their properties. Paris, the top city on the site,
has some 40,000 listings.
The network effects generated by digital platforms may enable their continued robust
growth. As soon as a company or an individual user has one positive experience with an
on-demand platform, they are likely to return to it—and they become more willing to trust
other providers on other platforms for different types of services. A survey by ride-sharing
platform BlaBlaCar found that after trying ride sharing, respondents were 1.3 to 3.1 times as
likely to participate in other sharing economy activities, including peer-to-peer house rentals
and buying and selling used goods.
59
However, it is useful to put the remarkable growth of the biggest on-demand platforms
into perspective by considering their penetration into the population at large. A recent Pew
Research study seems to indicate that the use of digital platforms for ride sharing, home
sharing, and on-demand services is predominantly a phenomenon for young urbanites. It
found that three-quarters of Americans were unfamiliar with the term “sharing economy.”
Fifteen percent had used on-demand transportation services—but twice as many did not
know these services exist.
60
This limited awareness caught many by surprise, but it is an indication of room for growth
as these platforms gain visibility, expand into smaller cities, and become more accepted.
MGI’s own survey indicates that 30 percent of working-age Americans and 42 percent of
Europeans are not aware that they can use digital platforms to earn money. It seems likely
that many people who could benefit from additional options for earning income and would
choose to pursue this option simply do not yet know this avenue is open to them.
Any discussion of the growth potential of digital platforms for independent work should be
tempered by the reality that many of these platforms have struggled to gain traction. Some
have folded outright; these include SpoonRocket, which offered low-cost meal delivery, and
Homejoy, which offered housecleaning services. Other struggling platforms have resorted
to cutting wages, laying off workers, or pivoting away from the on-demand consumer
model.
61
Others simply have not attained the scale needed to keep the price of their services
down. Once-abundant venture capital for any digital startups that promised to bring the
Uber model to additional types of services has begun to dry up, and the valuations of many
high-flying startups have declined sharply. Instead of continued expansion in the number of
viable digital platforms, intense competition seems likely to weed out many companies.
57
Jonathan Hall and Alan Krueger,
An analysis of the labor market for Uber’s driver-partners in the United States
,
Princeton University Industrial Relations Section working paper number 587, January 2015.
58
Airbnb summer travel report: 2015
, Airbnb, September 2015.
59
Frédéric Mazzella and Arun Sundararajan,
Entering the trust age
, BlaBlaCar, June 2016, available at https://
www.blablacar.com/trust.
60
Aaron Smith,
Shared, collaborative, and on demand: The new digital economy
, Pew Research Center, May
2016, based on national survey conducted in November-December 2015.
61
See, for example, Ellen Huet and Jing Cao, “On-demand valet parking seemed like such a great idea. It
wasn’t,”
Bloomberg
, March 14, 2016; Leena Rao, “Instacart slashes pay for grocery couriers,”
Fortune
, March
11, 2016; and Mike Isaac, “Delivery start-ups face road bumps in quest to capture untapped market,”
New
York Times
, February 11, 2016.
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