Every time you open Instagram these days it feels like just about everyone you know has a side hustle. Candles, makeup, clothing, underwear, you name it, someone on your feed is earning some bonus coin doing it. But what are the top-paying side hustles in Australia?
Canva, the graphic design company, has put in the time, crunched the numbers, asked around in the freelance community to see who’s making pretty legit bank with their side hustles, and have now pulled together a very interesting page of research.
For those of us with an eye for detail (and maybe love a bit of Celeb Spellcheck), you’ll be stoked to know that the highest-paying freelance gig is proofreading and editing, with an estimated total earnings of over $14k by active part-time freelancers as of March 2021.
Following that is 3D and 2D modelling, which makes me feel like all the hours I poured into MS Paint and KidPix weren’t entirely for nothing but fucking around with the paint bucket tool.
After that is the kinda vague job of ‘blog post services’, then social media advertising, illustration, and SEO (search engine optimisation) services.
Looking at these numbers, there’s no doubt that the digital world is going off its clackers. Absolutely not a single sniff of your old high school mate’s probably-MLM makeup job in this list. You know who I mean – the ones that slide into your DMs after years of silence with a “heyyyy babes!” and a job pitch.
Video editing, ghostwriting, animation and website design also clock into the top 10, so you can go and show your parents that all the time you sunk into the family computer is clearly paying off.
Over the lockdown months, a bunch of gigs also boosted right up in sales, and the boffins at Canva figured out what businesses have been booming over the Big Inside time.
Business card design and Photoshop editing came in the top two places with a sales spike of over 70% pre and post-lockdown. Whoever is buying business cards in a lockdown is truly baffling to me, but I guess y’all could have been doing letterbox drops on your allocated exercise time?
Big nerds rejoice, because coding came in third place with a sale jump of 59.5%, and social media advertising followed in fourth. Transcribing audio files – a job which every journo and writer loathes doing – took fifth place, with nutrition services, blog post services (???), social media manager, viral promoter (omfg), and website building rounding out the list.
What can we learn from this? Everyone spent a fucking whopping amount of time online in the last 12 months, and the side hustlers absolutely profited off that.
