Online Labour Index

With the Gig economy and human cloud landscape playing an ever-increasing role in the workforce solutions ecosystem, statistics regarding online freelance labor is vital. The Online Labour Index (OLI)  2020 from the Oxford Internet Institute is an economic indicator that provides an online gig economy equivalent of conventional labor market statistics. It measures the supply and demand of online freelance labor across occupations, by employer country and then by both employer and occupation by tracking the number of projects and tasks across platforms in real time. The OLI tracks all the projects/tasks posted on the following platforms, English: freelancer.com, guru.com, Mturk.com, peopleperhour.com, upwork.com, Spanish: freelancer.es, twago.es, workana.es and Russian: freelance.ru, freelancehunt.ru, and weblancer.ru, representing at least 70% of the market by traffic.

Online Labour Demand 

The visualization lets you explore the OLI 2020. It shows how the utilization of online labour varies over time and across countries and occupations. The index is normalized so that 100 index points on the y-axis represents the daily average number of new projects in May 2016. With the navigation panel on the right-hand side you can customise your visualisation on demand across platform languages, occupations, or countries to then download your selected data by clicking on the “Download Data” button.

Online Labour Supply

Tracks where in the world online gig work gets done, by observing workers active on major online labour platforms. The visualizations allow you to explore how the supply of different types of work is spread across the globe. In addition, the worker supplement allows you to explore where the global online freelancer population is located. Of particular interest in this supplement is that the index now provides data on the gender breakdown of online labour supply under the tab “Female Workers”.

The Online Labour Index is produced Stephany, F., Kässi, O., Rani, U., & Lehdonvirta, V. (2021). Online Labour Index 2020: Online Labour Index 2020: New ways to measure the world’s remote freelancing market. arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.09148