Data Story
The freelance ecosystem continues to show its resilience as web traffic for freelance websites grew last week by 7% year over year. This growth accelerated from moderating growth over the last month or so.
While freelance services are seeing the strongest acceleration among internet platforms, it isn’t the only area seeing an acceleration. Accelerating growth is also showing up in ed tech (education technology). This is interesting as freelancing/self-creators deconstruct traditional work, similar to how ed tech deconstructs formal education.
What we know is that during periods of economic anxiety, we have historically seen individuals looking to learn new skills while also putting those skills to work as self-creators. Is this the very early start of this? Time will tell...
Potential Investment Implications
Over the last several weeks, we listened to many earnings calls from internet-based companies. We heard from several companies that the trends were starting to shift more favorably. These observations also appear in some of the alternative data that we track. The implications suggest that the pause in consumers and small businesses may be tailing off as people get back to business. Several weeks isn’t a trend, but it is encouraging.
Disclaimer: See the disclaimer page. Not a recommendation to purchase or sell any securities mentioned.