# How Many Online Workers are there in the World? A Data-Driven Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.12648 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12648/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [FIRST: A Framework for Optimizing Information Quality in Mobile Crowdsensing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11147/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Improving Task Instructions for Data Annotators: How Clear Rules and Higher Pay Increase Performance in Data Annotation in the AI Economy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14565/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

An unknown number of people around the world are earning income by working through online labour platforms such as Upwork and Amazon Mechanical Turk. We combine data collected from various sources to build a data-driven assessment of the number of such online workers (also known as online freelancers) globally. Our headline estimate is that there are 163 million freelancer profiles registered on online labour platforms globally. Approximately 19 million of them have obtained work through the platform at least once, and 5 million have completed at least 10 projects or earned at least 1000. These numbers suggest a substantial growth from 2015 in registered worker accounts, but much less growth in amount of work completed by workers. Our results indicate that online freelancing represents a non-trivial segment of labour today, but one that is spread thinly across countries and sectors.