Where the money in online work comes from, and who takes a cut
Opportunity Update reports published platform rates, published earnings data and named federal enforcement actions.
Three kinds of document sit behind every page here. The first is a platform’s own terms: a fee schedule, a revenue share, a payout threshold, published by the company that applies it. The second is official statistics — the Federal Reserve’s household survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ count of multiple jobholders. The third is the enforcement record: complaints, stipulated orders and penalty notices, described as the regulator’s own filings describe them.
The four sections follow that division. What the platforms publish holds the rates. What people actually earn holds the surveys and the official tables. The enforcement record holds the named actions and the Rules they were brought under. The trade that sells the figure holds the course-and-coaching business and the documents it is required to publish.
A complaint states what the Commission says happened and what it asked the court to order; the two are different documents doing different work.
Photo: Kindel Media / PexelsFigures that go stale carry the date they were taken, inside the sentence that uses them. Cases are described by the party the Commission named and the relief on the record. The complete list of pieces is on the archive page.