Workers Spurn Cash for Virtual Coin to Fund Online-Game Habits 2010-06-18 04:01:00.11 GMT
By Joseph Galante
June 18 (Bloomberg) -- Amanda Dorsey has spent dozens of hours categorizing search results on EBay.com, verifying search- engine links and doing other online jobs for CrowdFlower Inc., a San Francisco employment agency.
Dorsey doesn’t get paid in legal tender. She takes her wages in the form of virtual money, which she’s used to buy a gray winter coat and a sexy yellow doctor’s uniform for her avatar, or virtual self, on TinierMe.com, a chat and game site.
There’s nothing odd about it, says Dorsey, a 28-year-old unemployed writer and editor in Florida. “Doing work for virtual currency is pretty much like any other form of putting forth an effort for a reward,” she said.
Dorsey is one of about 100,000 people, or half the on- demand workforce at CrowdFlower, who have taken pay in virtual rather than real dollars, says Chief Executive Officer Lukas Biewald. Virtual cash can be used to buy seeds or weapons to play “FarmVille,” “Mafia Wars” or other games on social-media sites like Facebook Inc., Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its June 21 issue. Consumers will spend $1.6 billion on virtual goods in the U.S. this year, double 2009’s tally, according to ThinkEquity LLC.
“It’s astonishing the surprising behavior these games have unearthed,” Michael Dortch, director of research at technology consulting firm Focus.com in San Francisco, said in an interview. “We have to stop differentiating between the virtual world and the real world. The virtual world is very real.”
‘Scratching the Surface’
CrowdFlower offers gamers a way to work for their fake living. It pays to place help-wanted ads within such games as “FarmVille,” created by Zynga Game Network Inc. in San Francisco. People who answer the ads are then placed at companies by CrowdFlower, which is compensated in real money.
“We’re just scratching the surface,” said Biewald, who expects to pay virtual wages worth about $1 million this year, compared with less than $50,000 last year.
CrowdFlower pays on a per-task basis, at a rate set by the companies that hire it to find workers. One client is PeopleBrowsr, a San Francisco consulting firm that monitors comments about brands on social networks such as Twitter Inc.
The site uses CrowdFlower to find workers to sift through as many as 40,000 tweets an hour and categorize each as positive, negative or neutral. Workers get about 1 cent a tweet, or the equivalent in digital currency, says PeopleBrowsr CEO Jodee Rich.
Tangible Merchandise
Last year, Tina Wang, 55, started doing online work, judging search results for EBay Inc., to kill boredom as she recovered from back surgery. An hour’s work would earn her about 66 Swag Bucks, a virtual currency that can be redeemed for real items from participating merchants.
A $5 gift card from Amazon.com Inc. costs Wang 450 Swag Bucks, or almost seven hours of work. She’s earned enough to buy her grandchildren an $80 rocket ship and a doll house. For Wang, the work is hardly about a paycheck.
“People don’t do Swag Bucks really to earn money,” said Wang, who lives in Alpine, Utah. “I started out just doing it for fun. But then I started getting enough Swag Bucks that I could get Amazon gift cards.”
Biewald says demand for virtual rather than real wages more often skews young.
“There will be a whole new generation of kids growing up who won’t really see the difference,” he said.
For Related News and Information: Social-networking news: NI SOCIALNET BN <GO> News about Facebook: 798754Z US <Equity> CN <GO> News about Zynga: 3333902Z US <Equity> CN <GO> Top technology news: TTOP <GO>
--Editors: Lisa Wolfson, Jim Aley
To contact the reporter on this story: Joseph Galante in San Francisco at +1-415-617-7163 or jgalante3 at bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at +1-415-617-7223 or tgiles5 at bloomberg.net.