4.7m people in the UK work in the gig economy

"Last month, new data on the U.K.’s gig economy surfaced from the University of Hertfordshire, concluding that the number of gig workers in Britain has more than doubled in the last three years, now reaching 4.7 million professionals.
Experts say the explosion of technology platforms like Uber and Deliveroo ushered in waves of opportunity for professionals to have greater control over when, where and how they work. The U.K.’s Trades Union Congress, however, sees this surge in gig workers from a different angle."
Source:  PYMNTS, 1st August 2019

Uber has completed 10bn trips

"Uber has reached a major milestone: completing more than 10 billion trips.
“We’ve hit some pretty exciting milestones together in the past, and this latest one is no different,” the company wrote in a blog post. “On Sunday, June 10, 173 trips and deliveries started simultaneously at 10:12pm GMT, putting us over 10 billion completed trips.”
The ridesharing company has made trips in more than 21 countries across five continents, including Montreal, Mexico City and Miami. Uber revealed that Latin America took the top spot for most simultaneous trips on a continent. The shortest Uber Eats delivery clocked in at just over half a mile, while the longest trip was a 41-mile ride to the airport in Denver."

Source:  PYMNTS, 25th July 2018

UberEats is bigger than Uber in several markets

"UberEats stands out even from the rest of the company’s fast-growing — and unprofitable — business. The delivery service, available in more than 120 markets globally, sometimes eclipses Uber’s main ride-hailing business in markets like Tokyo; Taipei, Taiwan; and Seoul, South Korea, the company said. The number of trips taken by UberEats drivers grew by more than 24 times between March 2016 and March 2017. As of July, UberEats was profitable in 27 of the 108 cities where it operated. Uber declined to reveal the service’s revenue."

Source:  New York Times, 23rd September 2017

Uber drivers in the US received $50m in tips in 6 months

"Uber has made some changes to its driver experience as part of its ongoing “180 Days of Change” campaign. Uber introduced the 180-days effort in June, with its decision to finally add tipping to its app as the first in a series of changes designed to improve the driver experience and reduce turnover among that important user group. Now, Uber is adding a few new features, including trip type preferences, more driver destinations and long trip notifications.
Already, Uber is seeing positive results from its 180-days program changes, including rapid uptake of its tipping option on the rider side.
“This week, we’re going to hit $50 million dollars in tips for drivers,” explained Uber’s U.S. and Canada manager Rachel Holt. “We launched the tipping effort in three cities two months ago, but we didn’t roll it out all over the U.S. until the middle of July. So we’re really, really excited just to see how well that feature has done in just a short period of time.”
That $50 million is a lot in context: Lyft has had the feature for years, and hit just $250 million in tips in July. Drivers have made around 200,000 phone calls to support, Holt says, since Uber introduced 24/7 phone service, and on average they reach an agent in less than 30 seconds. Eighty-five percent of drivers have said they’re satisfied with the experience."

Source:  Techcrunch, 22nd August 2017

$20bn of rides were booked through Uber in 2016

"The ride-hailing giant more than doubled gross bookings in 2016 to $20 billion, according to financial information Uber shared with Bloomberg. Net revenue was $6.5 billion, while adjusted net losses were $2.8 billion, excluding the China business, which it sold last summer.
[...]
Uber’s business is massive and getting bigger. In the last three months of 2016, gross bookings increased 28 percent from the previous quarter to $6.9 billion. The company generated $2.9 billion in revenue, a 74 percent increase from the third quarter. Losses rose 6.1 percent over the same period to $991 million.
While the rate of sales growth compared with losses is encouraging, Uber is still losing a significant sum, said Evan Rawley, a business professor at Columbia University. “That’s a lot of cash to burn in a quarter,” he said. Jeff Jones, the company’s president of ridesharing who resigned last month, previously joked to staff that he joined Uber expecting P&L, meaning a profit and loss statement, but only found an L."

Source:  Bloomberg, 14th April 2017

Human drivers need to take control of Uber's self-driving cars about once per mile

"Human drivers were forced to take control of Uber's self-driving cars about once per mile driven in early March during testing in Arizona, according to an internal performance report obtained by BuzzFeed News. The report reveals for the first time how Uber’s self-driving car program is performing, using a key metric for evaluating progress toward fully autonomous vehicles.
Human drivers take manual control of autonomous vehicles during testing for a number of reasons — for example, to address a technical issue or avoid a traffic violation or collision. The self-driving car industry refers to such events as “disengagements,” though Uber uses the term “intervention” in the performance report reviewed by BuzzFeed News. During a series of autonomous tests the week of March 5, Uber saw disengagement rates greater than those publicly reported by some of its rivals in the self-driving car space.
When regulatory issues in December 2016 forced Uber to suspend a self-driving pilot program in San Francisco, the company sent some of its cars to Arizona. Since then, Uber has been testing its autonomous cars along two routes in the state. The first is a multi-lane street called Scottsdale Road — a straight, 24-mile stretch that runs through the city of the same name. According to Uber's performance report on tests for the week of March 5, the company's self-driving cars were able to travel an average of 0.67 miles on Scottsdale Road without human intervention and an average of 2 miles without a “bad experience" — Uber’s classification for incidents in which a car brakes too hard, jerks forcefully, or behaves in a way that might startle passengers. Uber described the overall passenger experience for this particular week as "not great," but noted improvement compared to the prior week's tests, which included one "harmful" incident — an event that might have caused human injury."

Source - Buzzfeed, 16th March 2017

More than half of Uber driving is done by people who work more than 35 hours a week

"More than 1.5 million people all over the world drive for Uber. The company has won many court battles over its classification of them as contractors and not employees.  Over the last eight years Uber has upended the taxi industry and is credited with creating a new sector of the workforce: the “gig economy.” The company proudly proclaims that the share of drivers who work less than 10 hours a week has climbed to more than 60 percent.
In one recent TV commercial, a smiling actor playing a sometimes-driver quips, “These days, everyone needs a side hustle, and driving with Uber lets you go from earning to working to chilling at the push of a button.” The sound of a cash register chimes in the background.
What Uber has never said publicly is that half of the driving gets done by people who work more than 35 hours a week. Those workers generate about half of Uber’s revenue and are responsible for about half of Uber’s trips, Uber confirmed after Bloomberg analyzed a study of its drivers conducted by the company. A small number of those drivers will go to extremes, like sleeping in parking lots, to make a living."
Source:  Bloomberg, 23rd January 2017
Note - its possible for both 60% of the drivers to work less than 10 hours a week, and for more than half the driving to be done by people who work over 35 hours a week.

Uber 'lost more than $2.2bn in 9 months in 2016'

"Even as Uber Technologies Inc. exited China, the company's financial loss has remained eye-popping. In the first nine months of this year, the ride-hailing company lost significantly more than $2.2 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. In the third quarter, Uber lost more than $800 million, not including its Chinese operation.
At the same time, the company's revenue has continued to grow even after leaving the world's most populous country. Uber generated about $3.76 billion in net revenue in the first nine months of 2016 and is on track to exceed $5.5 billion this year, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is private."

Source:  Bloomberg, 20th December 2016

Uber has 40m monthly active riders, who spend an average of $50 per month each

"Travis Kalanick says his drivers’ license is expired — though, of course he has to say that. But in Kalanick’s future, with a fleet of driverless Ubers shuttling people around, it might be that everyone’s drivers’ licenses will expire.
His company, Uber, could essentially be a replacement for owning a car for Kalanick, and also for the 40 million monthly active riders the company has. Kalanick revealed that number on stage at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit this year in San Francisco. Kalanick also said that drivers made somewhere between $1.5 billion and $2 billion last month. Those monthly active riders pay around $50 per month, he said."

Source:  Techcrunch, 19th October 2016

It took Uber six years to make the first billion rides; the second billion took 6 months

"It took Uber six years to complete a billion rides around Christmas 2015. Now, just six months later, the company has announced that they have completed their two-billionth ride.
Six months is 180 days, meaning the company was providing an average of 5.5 million rides a day, or 230,000 an hour to hit a billion rides in six months.
Even crazier – instead of one person completing the lucky trip that pushes the company past the two billion mark, there were 147 rides that all tied for the being the two-billionth trip.
All 147 rides literally started their trip the exact same second – at 4:16 AM GMT on Saturday, June 18. Even cooler – these 147 trips simultaneously started in 16 different countries on five continents.
As their reward for hitting the milestone, all 147 riders and drivers will receive $450 – since Uber is now in 450 cities around the world. This pales in comparison to the year of free rides (up to £10,000) gifted to the rider who hit one billion rides for the company, but it’s understandable that the prize was decreased considering there are now 147 winners."

Source:  Techcrunch, 18th July 2016

Taxi rides with China's Didi rose 20-fold in the year to March 2016

"China’s homegrown Uber arch-rival, Didi Kuaidi, is still seeing exponential growth nearly four years after the app launched.
The number of completed rides rose 20-fold from March 2015 to March this year, revealed Softbank today in its earnings briefing for 2015. Softbank is an investor in Didi.
The report also stated that Didi is profitable in 230 of the 300 cities where it operates. That’s likely a reference to Didi’s private car rides, which compete directly with UberX and UberBlack – not to Didi’s service for regulated taxis, which covers well over 400 Chinese cities."

Source:  Tech in Asia, 10th May 2016

Didi Kuaidi completed 1.43bn rides in 2015

"Chinese ridesharing and taxi app Didi Kuaidi announced a pretty startling statistic today: the company completed 1.43 billion rides in 2015. That includes 200 million rides completed in December alone. Didi says that its user base now exceeds 250 million, making it “the world’s largest mobile-based transportation platform.”
What about Uber, you might say? Well, Uber just completed its one billionth ride ever. So Uber did a billion trips between 2010 and now. Didi Kuaidi did nearly 1.5 billion in a single year.
Granted, it’s not an entirely fair comparison, as Didi’s 2015 number includes taxi rides booked through the app and bookings of all of its other services, some of which Uber doesn’t offer. But even in private-car ridesharing, data suggests Didi has 83 percent of the Chinese market, giving it a crushing lead over Uber. And since China is now the world’s biggest ridesharing market, maybe it’s no surprise that Didi is posting domestic stats that seem to outstrip Uber’s global stats."

Source;  Tech In Asia, 11th January 2016

Using a mix of public transport and Uber can be cheaper than owning a car

"Consider a household that makes about 2,000 vehicle trips per year, in line with the national average. (If that sounds like a lot of trips, remember the figure is per household and not per person.) It can either spend $10,000 a year on car ownership,14 or it can use a combination of public transit (at a cost of $2.50 per journey15) plus Uber and taxis.
If the household can make all its trips by public transit, then that’s by far the cheapest option. But suppose it cannot. How many Uber rides can it afford to take before owning a car becomes cheaper?
If Uber costs about $20 per ride — about what an UberX costs now for a 5-mile ride in New York in moderate traffic — then the household can make up to about 15 percent of its trips by Uber and the combination of Uber and public transit will remain cheaper than owning a car. On the one hand, that figure implies that the household still needs excellent access to public transit since it must make 85 percent of its journeys that way. On the other hand, 15 percent of 2,000 trips is still 300 Uber rides per year."
Source:  FiveThirtyEight, 28th August 2015

Uber taxis are the most-expensed form of ground transportation in the US

"In the three months ended in June, Uber overtook taxis as the most expensed form of ground transportation, according to expense management system provider Certify. Uber accounted for 55 percent of ground transportation receipts compared with taxis at 43 percent.
That’s a big jump from just the beginning of the year. In the first quarter, Uber Technologies had 46 percent of receipts tracked by Certify compared with 53 percent for taxis."

Source:  Skift, 16th July 2015

There are 14,000 Uber drivers in London

"[Boris] Johnson’s move follows a sharp rise in the number of minicabs looking for customers in the capital: numbers have increased by nearly a fifth in the past year to more than 78,000.
The rise has heaped pressure on Transport for London — which is currently undertaking a review of the London taxi market — to take action.
London’s long-established black cab drivers have complained that a lack of regulation was skewing the market in Uber’s favour.
Alarmed at Uber’s burgeoning popularity, black cab drivers have tried to stall Uber’s ascent with a legal challenge. The London Taxi Drivers Association took Uber to court alleging that the use of a smartphone to log journeys flouted regulations.
Uber said it now has about 14,000 drivers in London, making it the largest provider of private hire services in the city."

Source:  Financial Times, 16th May 2015

Earlier - 20,000 Uber drivers in San Francisco

There are more than 20,000 Uber drivers in San Francisco

"At Uber we are thrilled to be playing a role in unlocking economic opportunity and empowering entrepreneurs across the Bay Area, and we are even more excited to be able to accomplish this at such a large scale.
Today we’re proud to announce that we reached a new milestone: The number of Bay Area driver-partners on the Uber platform exceeded 20,000 for the first time… and we were not even halfway there just one year ago."

Source:  Uber blog, 14th April 2015

Uber has 160,000 active drivers in the US

"Ride-hailing company Uber announced plans Tuesday to create 1 million jobs for women as drivers in the next five years — offering a rare peek into its growth plans.
In the U.S., where Uber got its start six years ago, the company boasts 160,000 active drivers. Fourteen percent of them are women.
Globally, the number of drivers is less clear, but Uber boasts "hundreds of thousands" of driver partners around the world, Uber spokeswoman Kristin Carvell told USA TODAY.
Even if one conservatively assumes that Uber has as many as 900,000 drivers in the 55 countries where it operates, and that 50% of those drivers could be women in 2020 — Tuesday's announcement suggests that Uber expects to at least double its growth over the next five years."

Source:  USA Today, 10th March 2015

Uber is generating 50,000 jobs every month globally

Just one of the stats on Google Ventures' end of 2014 review or their portfolio companies, December 2014

Uber Drivers need to provide an average of 60 rides per week to make $50,000 p.a.

"After looking at the numbers, NerdWallet had a few big takeaways:
Based on their data, drivers can, on average, make more working for Uber than for Lyft and Sidecar in most places. Uber drivers make an average of $15.97 per ride with Uber, as opposed to Lyft ($11.48) and Sidecar ($13.35).
In order to make $50,000 a year, an Uber driver must provide 60.21 rides every week. A Lyft driver would have to provide 83.76 rides, and a Sidecar driver would have to provide 72.03 rides. To put that in perspective, 60.21 rides each week equates to between 20 and 21 hours of driving per week for an Uber driver.
To make $100,000 a year, drivers have to give 120.42, 167.52, and 144.05 rides every week on Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar, respectively."

Source:  Research by NerdWallet, reported by Business Insider, 1st December 2014

Note 1 - As ever, if you want to take a holiday you need to factor that into your other weeks

Note 2 - Based on current US rates

Uber is active in 240 cities in 46 countries

Source:  BusinessWeek, 20th November 2014
Note - it's currently adding a new city every 2 days