Measuring the Monetary Value of Online Volunteer Work

Abstract

Online volunteers are a crucial labor force that keeps many for-profit systems afloat (e.g. social media platforms and online review sites). Despite their substantial role in upholding highly valuable technological systems, online volunteers have no way of knowing the value of their work. This paper uses content moderation as a case study and measures its monetary value to make apparent volunteer labor’s value. Using a novel dataset of private logs generated by moderators, we use linear mixed-effect regression and estimate that Reddit moderators worked a minimum of 466 hours per day in 2020. These hours are worth 3.4 million USD based on the median hourly wage for comparable content moderation services in the U.S. We discuss how this information may inform pathways to alleviate the one-sided relationship between technology companies and online volunteers.

All That’s Happening behind the Scenes: Putting the Spotlight on Volunteer Moderator Labor in Reddit

“…Although K-S tests show the distributions of these metrics differ between our sample and the population, means and medians are close. And the minimum and maximum values in our sample suggest that it also provides reasonable coverage in values (see Li et al, 2022 for more details). Put simply, our sample is an imperfect but somewhat representative sample of the moderator population.…”

“…Reddit moderators have long needed better support for their work as well as protection against the risks associated with their role such as online harassment (Gilbert, 2020;Matias, 2019Matias, , 2016. One factor contributing to their lack of negotiation power in their relationship with platforms is the invisibility of their labor and an inability to quantify their contributions (Li et al, 2022). Designers of computing systems could consider improving the visibility of moderation work to correct these misperceptions and focus internal resources to support invisible work (Suchman, 1995).…”

The role of the big geographic sort in online news circulation among U.S. Reddit users

“…They also levy rules on what is appropriate, and what content will stay online as is, be edited, or deleted. A recent study 80 estimated that in 2020, the volunteer moderators' labour, if they were commercial moderators, would cost Reddit 2.8 per cent of the company's total revenue in 2019. Importantly, these volunteer moderators have a close connection with their respective communities and in-depth knowledge about community dynamics, which commercial moderators might not be able to replace.…”

What Teams Do: Exploring Volunteer Content Moderation Team Labor on Facebook

“…The tension over free labor in volunteer moderation has been highlighted in academic literature through case studies of lawsuits that volunteers brought against AOL in the 1990s (Postigo, 2003(Postigo, , 2009 and the moderator-coordinated Reddit blackout in 2015 (Matias, 2016). More recently, using a moderation-log-based method, Li et al (2022) were able to calculate that the monetary value of Reddit's volunteer labor from its roughly twenty thousand active moderators to be worth, at minimum, USD $3.4 million to Reddit in 2020 alone. If even one percent of Facebook's volunteer moderators contributed a similar amount of labor in basic tasks such as deleting user comments, that labor would be worth over USD $110 million to Meta's bottom line.…”

“…Thus, Facebook’s financial model is in part dependent on the continued free labor of these moderators (Li et al, 2022), even if such labor is knowingly given or even enjoyable to moderators (e.g., Seering et al, 2022). As Terranova (2000) articulated over 20 years ago, digital cultural labor is both “pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited” (p. 37) as the appropriation and structuring of free labor online is “part of larger mechanisms of capitalist extraction of value which are fundamental to late capitalism as a whole” (p. 51).…”