Survey: Crowd Sourcing a Second Job for Many

Crowd sourcing may be a second job for many, according to a new survey. Almost three-quarters of workers on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk online crowd sourcing site have jobs outside of the site, according to the survey by CrowdControl.

Crowd sourcing can involve breaking up a large task such as validating data or translation into many small tasks and farming them out to numerous workers online instead of hiring a single worker or small number of workers to do the single large task. Mechanical Turk follows this model.

CrowdControl also found in its survey that 21 percent of Mechanical Turk workers actually perform jobs on the site while at their regular day job. However, 77 percent do tasks at home, sometimes in between video games. Of workers with day jobs, 36 percent earn a salary of more than $50,000 annually and 61 percent have college degrees.

CrowdControl, a separate firm from Amazon.com, provides quality assurance software for crowd sourcing.

Filed by Staffing Industry Analysts, a sister company of Workforce Management. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

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