The Pressure Valve That Doesn’t Actually Let the Pressure Out

There's a pattern that plays out every time the economy turns nasty. Redundancies rise, energy bills climb, mortgages tighten. Within a few months the advice columns fill up with the same cheerful suggestion: start a side hustle. Sell something on Etsy. Drive for Uber a few evenings a week. Rent a spare room on Airbnb. The framing is always the same – you spotted an opportunity, you took control, you made it work.

The thing nobody mentions is that approximately half a million other people read the same advice column.

Why do platform earnings fall when sellers pile in?

This is how the mechanism actually works. A recession or a cost-of-living crunch arrives and a wave of new sellers pours onto every platform simultaneously – Etsy, Deliveroo, eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Vinted, the lot. Supply goes through the roof. Demand, meanwhile, is doing the opposite. The same economic pressure that pushed everyone into selling is also squeezing what buyers have to spend.

The result is predictable, if you've ever done basic economics: earnings per person collapse. Not just a bit. Dramatically. Deliveroo and Uber documented exactly this during the pandemic boom-to-bust cycle – more drivers chasing fewer orders means each driver earns less per hour, often well below what the headline "up to £X per week" ever suggested. Etsy sellers who joined in 2020 competed against roughly twice as many shops as those who joined in 2018.

The Platform Has Already Done the Maths

Here's the thing the platforms understand that the new seller doesn't: it doesn't matter much to them how many sellers there are. Etsy still takes its listing fee and its transaction percentage whether your handmade candle sells for £14 or sits in a shop nobody visits. Uber takes its cut whether a driver earns £8 an hour or £14. The platform's revenue is distributed across the whole pool. Your income is not.

The marketing that keeps the pool topped up is consequently very good at communicating upside and very quiet about saturation. You see the story of the ceramicist who quit her job. You do not see the six thousand ceramicists who joined the same week she did and never covered their material costs.

For a completely different example of marketing noise versus unmediated honesty, the gap between the two gets illustrated rather vividly at https://savingourplanet.co.uk/the-only-honest-review-of-a-luxury-holiday-comes-from-someone-who-can-t-read/ – the principle transfers surprisingly well.

Which side hustles still work once everyone tries them?

This doesn't mean side hustles are worthless. Timing and specificity matter more than the advice columns let on. The side hustles that hold their value in a downturn tend to be the ones with a genuine barrier to entry – a specific skill, a qualification, a piece of kit most people don't own, or a niche small enough that it doesn't attract a flood. Bookkeeping. Tutoring in shortage subjects. Specialist repairs. Not because those are more virtuous, but because they're harder to replicate at scale, so the supply surge doesn't swamp them in the same way.

The pressure valve metaphor is the honest one. When times get hard, side hustle platforms do release some pressure for some people – usually the ones who got there early, or brought something genuinely scarce. For everyone else, the pressure doesn't disappear. It just spreads itself more thinly across a much bigger crowd.

Read next

• The Lever You Keep Pressing (Even When the Pellets Have Stopped Coming)
• The Factory Floor You Never Clocked In To
• The Side Hustle Economy’s Dirty Little Secret