Nathan Chadwick here from Airtasker. I'm pleased to be providing you with an operational update following H2 of FY 2022. Alex, did you have any words that you wanted to mention quickly?
Good morning, everybody. My name's Alex from Airtasker. We will be kicking off shortly, but just a quick note that if you have any questions, there is a Q&A function at the bottom. Please type them. We'll answer the questions at the end. Anything we don't get to, we will answer personally after the call. All right. Just a reminder that we have our half year earnings coming out at the end of the month, end of February rather. There'll be more information then. All right, over to you, Timothy and Nathan.
Awesome. Thanks so much, Alex. Yes, as Alex mentioned, we've decided to bring forward an operational update. Usually we would do a bigger presentation following the half year results, but we thought we'd bring that forward. This is really all part of Airtasker opening up and upgrading how much we're sharing with investors as we go along on this journey. A quick reminder about Airtasker. We're Australia's number one marketplace for local services. In really simple terms, we connect people who need work done with people who want to work.
We believe this is an absolutely huge opportunity because if you look at the way that people buy physical products, the experiences are so slick on Amazon or Alibaba or Kogan. But when you think about the way people engage with local services, you know, if you've got a leak in your bathroom or something like that, you know, what do you have to do? You have to ask a friend, roll the dice and go to the classifieds or a lead generation platform. It's so difficult that most people just avoid this altogether. At Airtasker, we're creating simple ecommerce for local services. Our mission at Airtasker is to empower people to realize the full value of their skills.
Creating jobs isn't a by-product of what we do on Airtasker, it's actually part of our core purpose. We believe this is an absolutely massive opportunity because 7.1% of Australians are already using our flexible platforms to be able to generate an income, and 34.8% of those people choose to use Airtasker. In fact, since we started, I'm pleased to say that we've created more than AUD 1.7 billion in job opportunities. Although this is, you know, a really significant number, it represents only about 0.3% of the opportunity in Australia. An update on last quarter. Q2 saw a strong performance with GMV up 39% to AUD 48.6 million.
That was up around 23% on the previous corresponding period in FY 2021. We also saw revenue increase 37.5% to AUD 8.1 million. The difference there in the growth rate is that, Airtasker really invested into creating trust with our taskers by taking certain actions to help them and support workers during the COVID pandemic. That had a temporary impact on take rate, which has now normalized into the second quarter. Looking at GMV on a weekly basis actually tells an even more clear story. While lockdowns did have a temporary impact in the first quarter, this really bounced back in the second quarter.
You can see there that we reached GMV around AUD 4.5 million per week, which was a record, not only in terms of the absolute number that we reached, being an all-time record, of course, but also the annualized growth from peak to peak, accelerating, from 2019, rather, to 2020 and then into 2021. Looking at what drove this accelerating GMV trajectory, there were two main things that happened here. The first is that we saw unique paying customers.
While that of course was depressed while the lockdowns were happening, immediately following the lockdowns in October and November and December, we saw a increase in unique paying customer acquisition, with the number of unique paying customers being 2%, peak week October, 6.6% in November, and then 8.9% in December. Really pleased with the way that has bounced back. Given that platform to Nathan to talk a little bit about the average task price.
Thanks, Tim. We're seeing a consistent upward trend in task price since Airtasker's inception. That's a function of improved customer marketplace over time with customers being more comfortable transacting increasingly complex tasks on the marketplace. That trend has accelerated somewhat over the past couple of years, and it's a function of two things really that we're aware of. Firstly, we're seeing consistent above trend growth in trades categories, which have higher task values, so electricals, plumbing, tiling, et cetera. Now three or four years ago, those would have been quite niche vertical marketplaces for us. They're now very much mainstream categories on Airtasker. Secondly, we're seeing a period of rebalancing in supply and demand for tasks, which is resulting in improving wages for Aussie workers, which is a great outcome obviously for our taskers.
In terms of days in lockdown, we've looked at and analyzed the impact of lockdowns on marketplace activity. If we take Q1 of FY 2022, we can see that there was clearly a very large impact with 188 major city days in lockdown. That had an impact of around AUD 12 million in GMV to Airtasker. This reduced in Q2 to having about 32 major city days in lockdown. This resulted in a much lower impact to our GMV growth in Q2. Although if we normalize that out, that would have added about AUD 2 million in additional GMV in the second quarter.
If we look at our H2 guidance, we're actually updating the guidance there from initially where we had AUD 105 million of GMV in the second half up to an increase of AUD 107 million-AUD 110 million in the second half. This represents full year GMV of AUD 191 million-AUD 194 million, and lockdown adjusted GMV of AUD 205 million-AUD 208 million. This of course is under the assumption of no further lockdowns occurring and a new COVID normal.
I can see the chart here has actually had a bit of a glitch in it, so that will be updated and shared. There we go. What's driving our increase in our H2 guidance and why are we upgrading our guidance from AUD 105 million in the second half up to AUD 107 million-AUD 110 million in the second half? Well, first of all, we've got an absolutely enormous global TAM that we're currently pursuing. If you look at the Australian opportunity, we have a AUD 52 billion total addressable market. If we then add the U.S. and the U.K. to that, it's almost 10x the opportunity.
We're talking about a global TAM of more than $600 billion in the local services space. Looking at Australia, we've penetrated the market by about 0.3%, generating about AUD 153 million in GMV net by 2021. We've got an absolutely massive runway to grow in Australia. Actually, if we just sort of were able to just replicate this level of penetration in the U.K. and the U.S., we're talking about nearly $1.9 billion GMV opportunity. That's more than a $300 million revenue opportunity if we can just replicate the penetration that we've built in Australia. Let's start with our progress in the U.S.
In the U.S., we're in what we call the zero to one phase of building out a marketplace. This is a very, very first phase of a marketplace where you're going from zero activity to igniting that spark and getting that first traction in there. The metric that we focus on during this period is posted tasks. The reason why that we focus on posted tasks is because every posted task that's created represents a job opportunity for our taskers. As these job opportunities spin up, that's how we create an engaged base of taskers, an engaged base of supply. Really, this is all about building out the infrastructure, the network effects to drive the Airtasker marketplace. In the last quarter, we saw about 71% increase in posted tasks quarter-on-quarter.
You can see here that we've focused on our four key cities for this flag, Atlanta, Dallas, Kansas City and Miami. We're seeing significant traction and growth in each of those markets on that metric. What we're also seeing now in those blue bars on the right-hand side chart there is we're seeing a spillover effect into non-core U.S. cities as well. They're all the cities that we're not putting core investment into. You're seeing there that a big base of growth is building outside of those non-core cities. This is the same effect that we saw in Australia. It's a really positive byproduct, a really positive side effect of the marketing that we do when we focus on certain cities.
If we then hop across the pond to the U.K. In the U.K., we're in the second phase of building out the marketplace. We've already developed that posted tasks transaction, and we're now focused on balancing the marketplace to get the demand side, the posted tasks up, as well as the supply side, that really engaged base of taskers. Then focusing on connecting those two things together to produce transactions which are measured in GMV or gross marketplace volume. In terms of an update there, in Q2, we saw the posted tasks, the demand side of the marketplace, increased by 106% on PCP.
We also saw the supply side of the market, as measured by the number of quotes going through the platform, increased by 102% on PCP. Those two things, demand and supply, are now growing in balance. That resulted in GMV growing by 121% on the prior corresponding period. In addition, we hired a U.K. country manager to focus initially on growth in London, but then across all of the U.K. We're investing into marketing in the second half of the year due to the seasonality and the seasonal nature of our growth in the U.K., with a marketing media split of around 20% in the first half and 80% in the second half.
A much more aggressive marketing investment in the second half of FY 2022. In terms of the team that we're building, we've had a really significant leveling up of our leadership team. In July 2021, we brought on board our first ever CMO at Airtasker, Noelle Kim. She joined us from being the head of marketing at Instagram Asia Pacific. In the second quarter of this year, we onboarded Patrick Collins in the role of Chief Product Officer. Patrick was formerly the head of product and technology at Zip.
Really great win to bring him on board to lead our product and operations function for Airtasker. Then in Q3, in January of 2022, we brought on board Isa Notermans as our first ever Chief HR Officer. Isa was previously the head of diversity at Spotify in New York City, and before that had roles at Pandora, DesignCrowd and Google. What's really been fantastic here is onboarding this international experience with these key executives all bringing on board experience from the U.S. market as well as of course having a strong understanding of the Australian tech landscape. Speaking about the investment into product, we've had some really key wins here.
We're continuing to invest into our core product and continuing to iterate and optimize the sales funnel here. One thing that I've been really excited about is while Airtasker is inherently a horizontal marketplace, we enable people to post any kind of category. We start to verticalize some of the experiences. As you're typing into our specific task experience, we're actually using machine learning now to predict the task category that you're anticipating using Airtasker for. What we then do is we present you with an optimized experience. For example, if you start typing cleaning or tidying up or vacuuming, we predict that that's a cleaning task, and we offer you a series of questions which make it much easier to post a cleaning task.
We've seen this increase in conversion rate by up to 10% in core categories. By removing that friction and making Airtasker a much more frictionless marketplace, we're actually able to drive significant growth. Another example of investing into our core product is the implementation of our smart alerts product. When someone posts a task, you know we're seeing upwards going through the platform, you're seeing that you have to be able to get really good at matching up a task with the right tasker. The initial launch of smart alerts has been really exciting, and we've seen that increase in engagement with our taskers up by more than 34%. Our listings product, which has really become part of the core experience on Airtasker, continues to grow.
We're seeing more than 3,500 bookings per week now. That's really showing there that there's a real preference for this listings model in certain categories. Finally, a feature that we've all been really excited and our customers have just been really begging us to roll out is rebooking. This is rolling out as a feature called Contacts. It's actually started to roll out to customers, and we've seen some really, really exciting results here.
What this enables our users to do is go back into Airtasker, find that tasker that they've worked with before, really simply message that tasker, and then to be able to transact through the Airtasker platform in a seamless way with an attractive win-win model, which makes it worthwhile for both the customer and the tasker to transact via Airtasker, and also a whole range of incentives and conveniences. This is rolling out in February of 2022. Yeah, that's starting tomorrow, which is really exciting. We believe this is a whole new range of opportunity in Airtasker's product space to address any transaction which isn't just the first transaction between a customer and a tasker. You know, we've talked a lot about our leakage in this area.
People ask us, you know, "What is the leakage on Airtasker between, you know, a customer and a tasker who's met before on the platform?" The answer was previously 100%. We did not have a functionality to enable those two people to reconnect, and now we do. Super, super excited about that. Let's refer a little bit to an update on marketing. As mentioned, following the onboarding of our first ever CMO back in July, we've really boosted our marketing capabilities. We've had our head count double from 10 folks to 20. With some really key senior hires being made in marketing.
We continue to invest into core organic growth marketing channels, things like SEO, content development and CRM, and seeing some really exciting wins from that in marketing to our existing user base, which is, you know, more than four million people. We've also established marketing operations teams to address some of these localized and seasonal things that happen in our marketplace. For example, when lockdowns were occurring, we froze the tiers of our taskers. Like we made sure that they were able to maintain their status on the platform. That was really important to build trust with our taskers. We also worked on things like COVID badges, so enabling people to be able to display their vaccination status on our platform and on their profile.
This is all about building trust between customers and taskers, and that's what really makes the flywheel move on Airtasker. In the first half, we primarily focused on a program of marketing infrastructure investments. Investing into things like strategy and creative production. I'm super pleased to say that after investing into significant research, strategy and content production, we're now getting ready to launch our brand-new brand campaign called The Joy of Done. That's gonna really ramp up in the second half with a working media marketing investment split of 25% in the first half of FY 2022, ramping up to 75% in the second half of FY 2022. This campaign is gonna roll out first in Australia.
I'm actually pleased to say that this campaign is gonna start rolling out today. Literally this morning is the first time the world's gonna be seeing the Joy of Done. We're then gonna be rolling it out into the U.K. in Q4 of FY 2022 and also investing significantly into marketing in the U.S. as well. Thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate taking the time to hear our operational update. I'm really excited about the fact that Airtasker can really grow totally in a global scope with Done. Thank you so much. Questions, either myself or Nathan are happy to answer them. Alex, do we have any questions coming through today?
Fantastic. Thanks, Tim. Yes, we do. We've got two questions so far. The first one is from Steven Sassine. It is on the U.S. market. With the spillover effect into non-core cities, is Airtasker looking at expanding its four-core city focus in the near term? And do you anticipate a further ramp up in non-core city contribution with additional marketing spend?
I would characterize the trickle over effect that we're seeing into non-core cities as a really, really pleasant side effect of our business model. What we can do is when we see pockets of growth coming out, we can really start to invest into those. We saw this exact same phenomenon happening in the Australian market. You know, we focused on Sydney, and it was really actually the fact that we saw it trickle over into Melbourne, that we thought, "Ah, geez, there's a real demand for what Airtasker is doing in Melbourne, so we better go over there." The same thing happened in Brisbane and then Perth.
It's a very organic process and a very pleasant side effect that we're aware of in our business model. In terms of where we focus over the next six months, we're really gonna focus on these four key cities that we've flagged. What I think is really important about our business model is that we've really got this variable investment that we can make into the U.S. from the U.K. The vast majority of Airtasker's investment has gone into our product investment in our head office. With the Australian market now spinning off cash flows and being able to wash its face, we can really choose how much we wanna invest out of that cash flow that's coming from Australia into the U.S. and the U.K.
Of course, we're adding additional cash flow investment into the U.S. and U.K. as well. Important to call out there that that's very variable. At this stage, we're focused on investing into those four key cities that we've mentioned over the coming quarters.
Fantastic. We've got two more questions on the same topic, actually, from Steven Sassine and Suraj Ahmed. The question is, will the rebooking functionality be available in all regions initially? How do you think about the take rate of that product? What sort of pricing should we expect for these repeat tasks?
From an overall level, you know, if I speak to my engineers, there's definitely a progressive rollout of a feature like this. You know, you've got to deploy it across multiple servers all across the world. But certainly, in terms of when you take a monthly or a quarterly view, yes, Contacts, which is the product that powers our rebooking, is gonna roll out globally from day one. That's really exciting. And I believe that it can have a huge impact on engagement in the U.S. and U.K., as well as in the Australian market. In terms of the take rate on this product, so that we have a pricing model which really makes sense for our taskers.
We focused on having a really attractive fee model on the tasker side of the marketplace. That's our service fee side of the market there. We are running a number of experiments to determine the final rate on that. But on the tasker side of the market, it will be considerably lower than the 10%-20% that we currently charge in service fees. That said, on the customer side of the marketplace, where we charge a booking fee, our current proposition is to maintain that booking fee on the customer side of the transaction.
To provide an anecdote on sort of the overall take rate that we are intending to charge for contracts in the U.S., learning from Zaarly's experience, they had a take rate of around 15% for first customer, first tasker transaction, and that progressively lowered over time to about 5%, if a customer and a tasker continued a relationship. At that 5% level, they saw close to zero friction due to that fee model. I think that this is a good benchmark for us to think about. Airtasker charges 17% currently on first transaction, so a little bit higher than where Zaarly was. That probably also puts a little bit of perspective on that 5%, where we believe there's virtually no friction between same customer and same tasker.
Okay. The next question, regarding U.S. metrics and the uplift in December, is there any benefit from the Zaarly acquisition in there?
For sure. I think the first thing to call out is that we, you know, acquired a large, registered user base from Zaarly, and we started to contact that tasker base, which has been really fruitful for us. At the same time as ramping up paid marketing investment and of course, organic growth kicking in. I'd say the other massive advantage of the Zaarly acquisition was the acquisition of the marketplace ops team that we have on the ground in the U.S.
Bo and his team over there have a, you know, a crack team of executives who are able to get in direct contact with the with the local tasker community and really make sure that as we drive increasing demand into the marketplace, we're also able to onboard and intelligently match tasks to taskers in the local area. To sum that up, I would say the big advantages of the Zaarly acquisition in relation to U.S. growth has been the CRM, the database that was acquired there, as well as other marketplace ops functions.
Thanks, Tim. One more question. Are you able to talk to your customer acquisition costs over the first half by region? There's a comment here that they've heard some recent commentary about the cost of SEO and SEM increasing as companies throw more marketing dollars into the mix.
In terms of providing updates to the market on some of these specific metrics, I'd flag there that we've got our half-yearly results coming out at the end of February. We're gonna be providing a little bit more color on a number of those metrics in that presentation. Also wanna call out that in terms of the split, we're really being in a ramp-up phase in this first half. As we kind of flag in the US, we're talking about a market split of roughly 20/80 in the first half and second half. We're really in those nascent stages.
I'd also call out one important phenomenon related to marketplaces, which is that as we grow, not only do we gather scale and, you know, economics of being of having a larger marketing spend, but we're also gathering better unit economics as we go. The product is actually predicated on the network effect. As we get larger, the product itself actually improves. You get that dual effect in terms of marketing efficiency improving. Of course, the marketing gets better, but also the product, the network effects are also improving over time, which drives even better marketing metrics.
Fantastic. That's it for questions.
Awesome. Thanks so much for your time, everyone, this morning. Thanks, Alex and Nathan. As always, looking forward to really the next steps of the journey for Airtasker. Thanks, everyone.
Thank you. Bye-bye.