Saturday, April 09, 2011

The digital economy: Jobs of the future | The Economist

How long until we start tracking the virtual unemployment index?

According to the World Bank’s research, gaming-for-hire services alone—such as earning WoW gold to sell on to rich, busy foreigners—was a market worth $3 billion in 2009. As a comparison, the study notes that all the coffee growers in the developing world combined earned just $5.5 billion for their labours. Another growing source of cyberwork is crowdsourcing: for instance, Amazon farmed out the job of eliminating duplicate pages on its e-commerce site to large numbers of casual workers, who got paid a few cents each time they spotted one.

The digital economy: Jobs of the future | The Economist

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