Online Labour Index
What is it measuring?
The index counts the number of projects and tasks posted across 12 different online platforms, classified by occupation and country.
What does it tell us?
The Online Labour Index 2020 (OLI 2020) is intended to track trends in online labor, and is normalized to the number of projects posted in May 2016, when the project begun. The number of projects and tasks in the first month has a value of 100, and numbers higher than that represent growth. The index most recently is at 133, having peaked at 171.5 in May 2020.
How is it collected?
All projects or tasks posted on the included platforms are automatically incorporated into the index in real time. The platforms include six English-language, three Spanish-language, and three Russian-language platforms.
Who collects it?
The iLabour Project of the Oxford Internet Institute, a project of the University of Oxford funded by the European Research Council.
Considerations
OLI 2020 is one of the few international measures of gig economy activity. It is a measure of projects and tasks, rather than of people participating in gig work. It can only be used to look at trends since 2016, rather than absolute counts of either tasks or workers.
How to access this data?
Live data available from the iLabour Project at https://ilabour.oii.ox.ac.uk/online-labour-index/. Data repository is available on Figshare, an online open access repository. https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Online_Labour_Index_Measuring_the_Online_Gig_Economy_for_Policy_and_Research/3761562
Reports
How many online workers are there in the world? A data-driven assessment.; 2021; ; Open Research Europe 2021, 1:53.;
Online Labour Index 2020: New ways to measure the world's remote freelancing market; 2021; ; Forthcoming with Big Data & Society;
Online Labour Index: Measuring the Online Gig Economy for Policy and Research; 2018; ; Technological Forecasting and Social Change;