How Many Online Workers are there in the World? A Data-Driven Assessment
This research provides a data-driven assessment of online freelancing, a non-trivial but thinly spread segment of labor, which is incremental as it builds on prior estimates to update global figures.
The study tackled the problem of estimating the global number of online workers by combining data from various sources, finding that there are 163 million registered freelancer profiles, with 19 million having obtained work at least once and 5 million completing at least 10 projects or earning $1000.
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.