What are the different types of gig marketplaces and how do they differ from one another?

The word, “gig,” what does “gig” mean, exactly? I look at it as labor categories, what are the categories of labor or human services out there.  What exactly is the work that has to get done? What is the skill that's needed for the work to get done? That’s one key dimension. 

The other dimension is, what is the size of the transaction? That means what's the duration? Is it five minutes, is it three years, or is it somewhere in between? And what is the frequency of usage – multiplying the two to get us the size of the transaction. Those are two key dimensions for me, when I map out how labor is being transacted or purchased. 

If you look at the skill dimension, that could be anything from physical work to knowledge work, and then within that, there are all these different skill types, like a surgeon at one end to maybe someone who's making fast-food at another end. The point is that this dimension affects how you buy and how you collect the supply network. 

The other key dimension is the size of the transaction. That could be like a two-minute job on Mechanical Turk, all the way to a four-year permanent employment that I'm getting through something like Indeed. In between, you've got all these things—it could be a 60-minute expert interview, the GLGs of the world, or maybe it's multi-hour shift work with Snagajob or Instawork. Upwards of that, it's in the middle there somewhere, expert type stuff that falls more into a one week, five-week, three months, or six-month range, temporary transactions. There is a continuum.

If you break it up that way, you can map out these different unique opportunities in the marketplace. 

There are other dimensions that you would also want to layer on like the geography – is it a local marketplace? Is it a hyper-local market? Uber is hyper-local, it has to be within a zip code. Or it could be a marketplace like Upwork, which is global, meaning it's completely online, completely remote. That's a key dimension that completely changes the dynamic. 

You can have marketplaces where it's highly curated, meaning everything is polished and it's highly vetted and you get just one choice. Or you get a free-for-all, like a Craigslist. 

All of these things affect the design of the market and how separate they are or can be.