Business

Newly Unemployed, and Labeling Photos for Pennies

People who've lost jobs and are stuck indoors are turning to crowd work—filling out online surveys and transcribing audio for less than the minimum wage.
A hand puts a quarter in a gum ball machine full of freelancers
Illustration: Elena Lacey; Getty Images

B.C. Kowalski, a writer at the local weekly in Wausau, Wisconsin, was expecting a boost to his income this spring. He was set to begin selling ads for local businesses on a podcast he’d launched on the side, Keep it Wausome. Then coronavirus restrictions shut down the town and its businesses.

To keep some extra dollars coming in, Kowalski has turned to Amazon’s crowd-work platform Mechanical Turk, where companies offer cents or dollars for small tasks such as labeling photos, transcribing audio clips, or answering survey questions.

Diane Brewer, who lives in Florida, is also counting on Mechanical Turk, as well as another crowd-work site called Prolific, where workers are paid to fill out surveys for academia and market research. She previously turned to crowd work during spells as a stay-at-home mom and convalescing after a car crash. Covid-19 convinced Brewer it was time to start again “to add some dollars to an uncertain future,” she says. Her long-term boyfriend works as a carpenter. “That may be an issue in the near future, because who is going to buy a house anytime soon?” she asks.

Brewer and Kowalski are among a global surge of people logging on to crowd-working sites due to the economic contagion of Covid-19. Millions of people are suddenly out of work or facing reduced hours, with many stuck at home sheltering in place. Crowd work can be done from anywhere with an internet connection.

UK-based Prolific saw 13 percent more workers in March than in February, according to its CEO, Katia Damer. Damer says that on average each crowd worker filled out more surveys, driving the value of transactions on the platform up more than 50 percent.

Hive, a crowd-work platform that specializes in tagging photos and other data for training machine-learning software, has also seen its workforce swell. Kevin Guo, the startup’s CEO and cofounder, says the daily count of new accounts on the service has more than doubled over recent weeks. A rush of new workers from Brazil and the Philippines has been particularly noticeable.

Amazon did not reply to a query about activity on Mechanical Turk, but Panos Ipeirotis, an NYU professor who has studied Mechanical Turk workers, says he’s seen more Turkers recently from Canada, Italy, and Brazil in particular. A spokesperson for Our Hit Stop, a discussion site for Mechanical Turk workers that sells a Chrome extension for finding the best paying tasks, says it has seen new memberships increase 20 percent and 30 percent of inactive members return.

Crowd work is generally not well paid. A 2018 study led by Carnegie Mellon University pegged the median wage at around $2 an hour although workers can push that higher by being careful about the tasks they select and using tools like Our Hit Stop’s that flag or snag the best work. Kowalski of Wausau says he uses those to select tasks that pay the equivalent of $9 to $15 per hour, but workers who need to take as much work as possible may not be able to be so choosy. Prolific markets itself to workers by promising that surveys pay at least $6.50 an hour.

The surge of crowd workers will increase the competition to land jobs, and could prompt those posting tasks to reduce their already low rates. But Kerri Reynolds, a vice president at Appen, which offers crowd-work jobs annotating images, text, or other data for clients including Microsoft and eBay, says she still has plenty of work to go around because Covid-19 has increased the supply of crowd work as well as crowd workers.

Reynolds says that might be because US companies have lost access to large pools of workers offshore as outsourcing companies have closed offices. “Perhaps with those shutting down, companies are looking for alternatives,” she adds.

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Guo of Hive says some of his company’s usual high-volume tasks, like spotting logos on sports videos to help companies track sponsorship deals, are less plentiful. But he notes that the company has more work than ever from clients that use crowd workers to help moderate social content and check user profiles.

“We have seen a dramatic uptick in new customers, as well as existing customers sending in much higher volumes of content to be moderated,” Guo says. He believes that’s partly due to social sites seeing more traffic from people stuck at home, and also because companies have shuttered offices where moderation staff worked. Some companies, such as Facebook, are wary of the privacy risks of sending content for moderation outside their own facilities, but others are turning to crowd workers to help, Guo says.

Companies turning to Hive for moderation typically use machine-learning algorithms to take a first pass at content, and use crowd workers for trickier tasks or to handle surges. One Hive customer, live streaming app Yubo, which has 30 million users, has seen time spent in livestreams increase fourfold and daily signups more than triple.

The coronavirus that has driven more people to crowd work has also created a new, somewhat ironic, stream of work on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Longtime Turkers have noticed that the site has seen its own epidemic of surveys posted by psychologists, economists, and other researchers asking people about their Covid-19 related thoughts, feelings, and experiences. “If the disease is anything like the surveys,” one person noted on a Turker forum, “it'll wear you down just thinking about it.”

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