“The combination of a massive labor shortage in the U.S. coming out of the pandemic and an increasingly crowded market of app-based share-everything companies is raising the prices for freelance and contract work,” writes CNBC’s Ari Levy. “Companies have to find new ways to bolster the supply-end of their platforms to meet consumer demand and continue growing at a rapid clip.” From the report: Far from taking the number to zero, Airbnb said in its second-quarter earnings report on Thursday that sales and marketing expenses surged 175% from a year earlier to $315.3 million. Costs aren’t quite back to pre-pandemic levels, but they’re not too far off the peak of $437 million in the fourth quarter of 2019. The difference now is that Airbnb is spending to attract hosts, rather than travelers. It’s becoming a common theme in the gig economy. Food-delivery service DoorDash said in its earnings announcement, also on Thursday, that it boosted sales and marketing costs by over 150% from a year earlier to lure Dashers, or what the company calls its drivers.
Uber and Lyft have been struggling with long wait times and consumer complaints about higher prices. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on his company’s earnings call last week that Uber has been spending more to get drivers on the road. “The heaviest driver acquisition spend and incentive spend that we think we will see and we saw was in Q2,” Khosrowshahi said. “We really had to take action very quickly because the marketplace was not at a place that we considered healthy, and we wanted to lean in to get wait times down, to get surge levels down.”
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