The home-sharing site Airbnb yielded the highest monthly return to its users, with a median income of $440, more than double the $210 a month earned by the median Lyft driver, according to San Francisco-based loan provider Earnest, which analyzed tens of thousands of loan applications to study the impact of gig-economy jobs. (Earnings on other popular platforms included a monthly median of $40 on craft-selling site Etsy, $70 on delivery app Postmates, $110 on services marketplace TaskRabbit and $155 on ride-sharing app Uber.)

The survey also noted that earnings spanned a wide range: “Several Airbnb hosts in our records, for instance, made over $10,000 per month, while others made less than $200.”

“We’re starting to see that these gigs are filling in the gaps for a lot of people — a little bit of extra money here for a student loan payment or a few hours of work there to create additional income,” said Catherine New, a senior editor at Earnest. “But bigger picture, you also see that people are having to work two or three jobs to make ends meet.”

Nearly 1 in 4 Americans now earns money from the digital “platform economy,” according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. And increasingly, their experiences — and their earnings — are split between those who are supplementing their incomes with side gigs and those who rely on those piecemeal earnings to eke out a living.

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There are “profound differences” in the ways people use the gig economy, says Aaron Smith, associate director of research on Internet and technology issues at Pew.

“A young professional who occasionally supplements her income by renting out her apartment on Airbnb is much different from a single mother who works for a ride-hailing service in between child-care obligations,” Smith writes in the report.

Black and Latino workers, and those with lower household incomes, tend to take on labor-intensive tasks — driving passengers for Uber or Lyft, say, or delivering groceries through Instacart or Postmates, the survey found. Their wealthier, white counterparts were more likely to make money by renting out rooms in their homes through Airbnb or selling handmade or used goods online on sites such as Etsy.

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“In the case of gig work, workers who describe the income they earn from these platforms as ‘essential’ or ‘important’ are more likely to come from low-income households, to be non-white and to have not attended college,” the report says. “They are also significantly more likely to say that they are motivated to do this sort of work because they need to be able to control their own schedule or because there are not many other jobs available to them where they live.”

In either case, experts say a slow job-market recovery, growing income inequality and stagnant wages — combined with ballooning student-loan debt — have exacerbated financial burdens for many Americans, leading to the growing popularity of side gigs. As a result, platforms such as Uber, which has more than 1 million drivers, have grown rapidly in recent years.

“While we continue to be at what is considered full-employment, the quality of each of those jobs has been dwindling, causing people to seek out new ways to supplement their full-time income,” said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “There is a lot more volatility in the world of work today than there was 20 or 30 years ago.”

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At the same time that it’s become harder to find a stable source of income to sustain a family, it’s become easier than ever to download an app that allows you to drive around passengers, rent out your bed or stand in line for concert tickets in exchange for money, said Sundararajan, author of “The Sharing Economy.”

But, he added, the findings also raise concerns about whether these arrangements are in the best interest of workers. Twenty percent of Americans feel that gig-economy jobs place “too much financial burden” on workers, according to Pew, while 23 percent said such jobs allow companies to take advantage of workers, who are often left to shoulder many of the risks and costs associated with part-time gigs. (About one-third of gig workers said there had been instances where they had not been paid for their work, according to Pew.)

“Labor laws, health insurance, a predictable schedule, paid vacation — all of those things are set up with the expectation that you’ve got a full-time job,” Sundararajan said. “Long term, we need to adapt. We’re no longer in a world where there’s just one employee-employer relationship.”