An unknown number of people around the world are earning income by working through online labour platforms such as Upwork and Amazon Mechanical Turk. We combine data collected from various sources to build a data-driven assessment of the number of such online workers (also known as online freelancers) globally. Our headline estimate is that there are 163 million freelancer profiles registered on online labour platforms globally. Approximately 19 million of them have obtained work through the platform at least once, and 5 million have completed at least 10 projects or earned at least $1000. These numbers suggest a substantial growth from 2015 in registered worker accounts, but much less growth in amount of work completed by workers. Our results indicate that online freelancing represents a non-trivial segment of labour today, but one that is spread thinly across countries and sectors.

翻译：全世界通过在线劳工平台(如Upwork和Amazon机械土耳其公司)工作赚取收入的人数不详。我们把从各种来源收集的数据结合起来,对全球这类在线工人(又称在线自由职业者)的人数进行数据驱动评估。我们的头条估计全球在线劳工平台上登记的自由职业者人数为1.63亿,其中约1 900万人至少通过该平台工作过一次,500万人已完成至少10个项目,或至少挣得1 000美元。这些数字表明从2015年起,注册工人账户有了大幅增长,但工人完成的工作量增长要少得多。我们的结果表明,在线自由职业者代表了当今非三边的劳动力部分,但这一部分分散在各个国家和部门。