Demographics of the Crowd We Use.

One of the common misbeliefs about crowdsourcing is that it creates a virtual sweatshop, essentially taking advantage of poor people in third world countries that are doing tedious tasks for pennies. Therefore many people are hesitant to outsource research tasks fearing that the results will be either of very poor quality or not representative of the actual U.S. population.

When researching the demographics of our crowdsourcing platform, we found that the typical worker is not one who completes tasks to make a living in a developing country. Instead, crowdsourcing work tends to be a replacement for TV or simply an activity to pass time for some spare cash as a reward. As you will see below the workers are a pretty representative sample of the online population, perhaps with a slight bias towards females and towards young participants. Let's see the results!

First, we would start with the country breakdown:

 

The clear result is that most of the participants are coming from the US and not from a third world country, despite the common misconception. This is due to the fact that the main method to get paid, requires someone to have a US bank account.

Then, the gender breakdown:

 

As you can see, there are slightly more females that males. We do not have a definite reason yet, but I get a feeling that females are less inclined to "waste time" and find that if they can exploit their spare time to get a little bit of income, then they would do it.

Next, the age distribution:

 

Not surprisingly, many young people participate in crowdsourcing, mainly as a way to get some extra cash and to be able to drive their car, etc.

And what about education?

Workers are a pretty representative sample. Most of them have a college education, and some of them even have PhDs! In fact, the distribution seems pretty similar to the distribution for the overall US population.

Similarly, the income distribution also follows closely the income distribution in the US:

Finally, why people participate in crowdsourcing for us?

From the qualitative survey, you can see that most of the participants mention money, one way or another. However, very few participate only for the money. Here is the breakdown of the responders when they had to choose (not exclusively) between the choices "for money," "for fun," and "for killing time."

A big thanks to Panos Ipeirotis, a board member of Data Discoverers, and a leading academic for spearheading this research project.

If you have any crowdsourcing research ideas, send them to info@datadiscoverers.com