  Since its emergence roughly a decade ago, microtask crowdsourcing has been
attracting a heterogeneous set of workers from all over the globe. This paper
sets out to explore the characteristics of the international crowd workforce
and offers a cross-national comparison of crowdworker populations from ten
countries. We provide an analysis and comparison of demographic characteristics
and shed light on the significance of microtask income for workers situated in
different national contexts. With over 11,000 individual responses, this study
is the first large-scale country-level analysis of the characteristics of
workers on the platform Appen (formerly CrowdFlower and Figure Eight), one of
the two platforms dominating the microtask market. We find large differences
between the characteristics of the crowd workforces of different countries,
both regarding demography and regarding the importance of microtask income for
workers. Furthermore, we find that the composition of the workforce in the ten
countries was largely stable across samples taken at different points in time.
