Online gig platforms seek to increase their “take rates” amid slowing growth; PitchBook: Fiverr and Upwork are trading at less than 20% of their pandemic peaks
Stephanie Stacey / Financial Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
Gig marketplaces previously expanded access to freelance work, but related coverage also documented how intense competition could mean lower pay and less stability for workers. Fiverr’s earlier public-market debut reflected an expansion-era model built around bringing more services and users onto the marketplace.
The push for higher take rates comes as the growth case is under pressure: research reported fewer platform freelance jobs in fields where generative AI performs well. PitchBook’s comparison with pandemic-era share-price peaks underscores how that pressure now reaches investor expectations as well as marketplace participants.
First-order effects
- Fiverr, Upwork and comparable platforms will focus more tightly on monetizing existing transactions as growth slows, rather than relying primarily on volume expansion.
- A higher take rate shifts more of each transaction’s value to the platform, leaving clients, freelancers, or both to absorb higher fees or lower net earnings when changes are implemented.
Second-order effects
- Freelancers may respond by raising quoted prices, moving repeat work off-platform, or favoring marketplaces with better economics; clients can compare total costs more closely across platforms and alternatives.
- Platforms face a trade-off between improved revenue per transaction and retaining enough buyers and sellers to preserve marketplace liquidity, especially where AI-exposed work has already seen declining platform job postings.
Third-order effects
- If slower transaction growth persists, freelance marketplaces may increasingly compete on pricing architecture, bundled services and retention rather than on the breadth of their talent listings alone.
- The pattern could deepen the tension inherent in two-sided labor platforms: monetization demands rise precisely when workers’ earnings and platform demand are most sensitive, potentially strengthening off-platform or lower-fee alternatives.
The trend: Online labor platforms are moving from growth-led marketplace expansion toward extracting more revenue from established transaction flows amid AI-related demand pressure.