Amazon's Mechanical Turk is the most popular micro jobs website with more than 500,000 registered workers from over 190 countries, majority of them from the US. There are a few Bitcoin freelance websites, including a couple of decentralized platforms, but compared to micro job websites, freelancing platforms require specialized skills to perform tasks whereas anyone can do micro jobs with basic internet knowledge. Additionally, if you compare Bitcoin/crypto freelance websites with any other freelancing platforms, majority of projects posted on the former are related to Blockchain technology, so a further division of skills which somewhat creates an entry barrier for people who are looking to earn some cryptocurrencies, but don't posses Blockchain/cryptocurrency related skills.
Last month, Coinbase acquired Earn.com for an estimated $100 million. The business model of earn.com is similar to that of any micro jobs website, users can earn free Bitcoin by answering emails and completing tasks/surveys. Compared to MTurk, Coinbase has more than 13,300,000 users and if Coinbase in the near future converts earn.com into a full-fledged micro jobs website, wouldn't it boost Bitcoin adoption? Yeah, you get pennies for completing micro jobs, but the point is they are not only popular in developing nations, but also in the US, Australia, Canada etc. Faucets were used to introduce people to Bitcoin (not anymore) and IMO, a micro jobs website owned by Coinbase (brand/recognition/free cryptocurrency) would be perfect to get people interested into cryptocurrencies.
As of today, Earn.com is a fast-growing, cash-flow positive business with a multimillion dollar revenue run rate. Hundreds of thousands of users have signed up to earn free cryptocurrency by answering emails and completing tasks. And thousands of senders have used Earn.com to send out paid emails and surveys to large audiences. I think it’s fair to say that it’s one of the first truly useful blockchain-based applications, where users can earn money in their spare time while senders can pay people to actually reply to their emails and fill out their surveys.
Now we’re about to take the model we’ve proven out at Earn.com and scale it up across Coinbase’s massive user base.
PS: Although there are decentralized alternatives to MTurk, I doubt they would be able to build a userbase like that of earn.com anytime soon.
https://medium.com/@balajis/the-turnaround-2d145589d814
