With Employment at Record Highs, What’s to Become of Australia’s Gig Economy Platforms?

When times were tough, particularly during pandemic lockdowns, Australian traffic to gig economy websites like Airtasker, Fiverr, hipages, and Upwork soared.

These platforms provide a relatively easy way for people offering services like cleaning, pet care, and even IKEA furniture assembly, to connect with prospective clients.

But as Australia’s unemployment rate fell to record low levels earlier this year, how has traffic to these sites been impacted?

Key takeaways

• Airtasker dominates the Australian gig economy sector with a 26.4% traffic share
• Between January 2023 and April 2023, all six major players experienced YoY traffic declines – with the exception of Upwork
• Airtasker’s funding deal with Seven West Media appears to have paid dividends with the platform outperforming in organic traffic and brand recognition

Jobs up, gigs down

In April 2023, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported Australia’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate had fallen to a near-record low of 3.5%. This rate of unemployment is near the record lows of the mid-1970s.

With more people employed, however, fewer were reliant on jobs picked up through gig economy platforms Airtasker, Fiverr, Upwork, Hipages, Oneflare, and ServiceSeeking.

Traffic to these platforms fell 14 percent YoY between January and April, indicating decreasing demand for services provided by these marketplaces.

Who’s who in the gig economy zoo

Zooming into the performance of each platform, only Upwork managed to increase its traffic (+2.10%). Airtasker, Fiverr, Hipages, Oneflare, and ServiceSeeking all experienced declines – with Hipages losing almost a third of its traffic YoY.

With its website capturing a substantial 25% share of the total category traffic, Airtasker has established its dominance in Australia’s gig economy platform category. This is largely thanks to superior brand recognition, which is evident when looking at its percentage of organic and paid search traffic.

Airtasker attracts more than 35% of its traffic from organic search engine results and only 2.27% from paid search. Its local brand recognition was greatly accelerated when Australia’s Seven West Media became the lead investor in a $22 million funding round in 2016.

The media company’s large stable of media channels helped propel Airtasker to the level of ‘household name’. This is something the gig economy platform is hoping to replicate in the UK, with the recent sale of 20% of its UK subsidiary to Britain’s Channel 4 in return for $6.5 million of free advertising.

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