Characterizing the Global Crowd Workforce: A Cross-Country Comparison of Crowdworker Demographics

Abstract

Since its emergence roughly a decade ago, micro-task crowdsourcing has been attracting a heterogeneous set of workers from all over the globe. This paper sets out to explore the characteristics of the international crowd workforce to date and offers a cross-national comparison of crowdworker populations from ten hand-selected countries. We provide an analysis and comparison of demographic characteristics and shed light on the significance of micro-task income for workers situated in different national contexts. With over 11,000 individual responses, this study is the first large-scale country-level analysis of the characteristics of workers on the platform Figure Eight (formerly CrowdFlower), one of the two platforms dominating the micro-task market. We find large differences between the characteristics of the crowd workforces of different countries, both regarding demography and regarding the importance of micro-task income for workers. Furthermore, we find that the composition of the workforce in the ten countries was largely stable across samples taken at different points in time.