Decoding the Online Labour Index (2016–2024)
The Online Labour Index (OLI), a pioneering effort to track the dynamics of the online global freelance labour market, offered valuable insights from 2016 to 2024. By capturing real-time data on job postings and worker profiles across various platforms, the OLI became a crucial resource for researchers studying the gig economy. However, data collection ceased in September 2024 due to access limitations, and this new brief aims to unpack the OLI’s inner workings and highlight important caveats for researchers using this data.
The OLI’s demand-side data, tracking the number of new project postings, provides a relatively consistent view of online labour demand. Starting with five major English-language platforms, the index expanded in 2020 to include some Russian- and Spanish-language platforms, becoming the OLI 2020. Data collection was done through web scraping, with adjustments made over time to accommodate platform changes and improve accuracy. While generally stable, the demand-side data was not without its quirks. Fluctuations sometimes arose from scraper modifications, website issues and technical issues. Despite these challenges, the demand-side data offers reasonable comparability across time, geographies, and occupations, especially from 2021 onwards.
Tracking online labour supply proved more complex. Defining a “worker” and capturing their activity consistently across platforms posed significant challenges. Issues with worker visibility, fluctuating platform structures, and the inability to determine the total workforce size hampered efforts to create a reliable supply index. In addition, several factors such as data collection gaps and data aggregation contributed to the supply-side data’s limitations. Due to these issues, the supply-side data should be considered a proof of concept. The observed trends in occupational and geographical distributions likely reflect data collection inconsistencies rather than genuine shifts in the workforce.
The OLI’s legacy lies in its pioneering effort to quantify online freelance work. While its data collection has ceased, the insights gleaned and the challenges encountered provide valuable lessons for future research in this rapidly changing field. Researchers using the OLI data must carefully consider its methodological limitations and interpret findings accordingly.
Download and read the full paper below to understand in more detail how the OLI was built, what changed along the way, and what caveats to keep in mind when using the dataset.