A recent story by Associate Professor Panos Ipeirotis of the New York University showed that Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and the Philippines are among the top Asian contractors on oDesk, a freelance site that pays hired workers by the hour.
In his blog post Philippines: The country that never sleeps (or, When is the world working? The oDesk Edition), Prof. Ipeirotis pointed out that data recorded by the oDesk Team client shows when a worker is active during the which time of the day and found out that contractors from the Philippines are practically active throughout the day compared to other top countries on the list.
The Philippines tops the list of freelance contractors with a peak of around 10,000 contractors, followed closely by India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Other non-Asian countries in the top 7 include the United States, Russia and Ukraine.
However, based on the graph of active workers shown above, freelancers from the Philippines tend to be evenly active across the 24-hour window unlike other countries on the top of the list which shows the variance between peak and off-peak hours.
All other countries have very natural patterns of being awake and asleep; Philippines is an exception. We see that the minimum for Philippines rarely drops below 5,000 active workers! All other countries (combined!) in their downtime time cannot beat Philippines in their low time. The supply of work is very constant over time.
Prof. Ipeirotis added that this unique behavior can be a huge advantage if you require labor for a human-powered application to be active at all times of the day.
oDesk is considered the top marketplaces for online freelance work followed by competing sites like Elance, Freelancer and Guru. oDesk has over 200,000 contracted professionals in its marketplace and the site has a global Alexa Rank of 479 making it one of the top destinations for online work.
Note: Updated to correct actual figures.
March 7, 2012
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