10 reasons to become a Toloker
Why do people across the globe become Tolokers? What’s the appeal of performing small and simple tasks? Why do they keep doing them despite the modest payment? These are the most common questions we get from people who haven’t yet joined the Toloka crowdforce. To answer them, we surveyed 10,000 Tolokers – and here’s what we found out.
What is Toloka?
Toloka is a global crowdsourcing platform with hundreds of thousands of users. It collects and analyzes data by getting large numbers of people to perform simple tasks right from their phones or laptops, for money. The client, or requester, gets the data they need, fast. They can test beta versions of software and AI, get valuable market information, and much more, in a high-speed, high-quality, scalable and versatile format.
To become a paid performer, all you have to do is create an account and select a task that looks good to you. You may like annotating video, performing field tasks, or interacting with new chatbots to help them learn to communicate better – with Toloka, you can try different things and find what kind of tasks you like most, or you can do a little bit of everything. You are your own boss. And anyone can do it – you don’t need education or experience. Toloka operates in more than 40 languages, so it doesn’t even matter where you’re from.
Why do hundreds of thousands of people internationally enjoy being Tokola performers? We used our own platform to find out!
Money, meaning, and fun: top 10 reasons to join
Last December, Toloka surveyed over 10,000 of its Russian-speaking performers in 5 countries, to find out why they use the platform. The users were given 6 answers to choose from, or they could enter their own. Then, Toloka analyzed their answers, and put together a rating of the top 10 ways users said working with Toloka benefits them.
Benefit 1: Earning extra cash. 79% said they do it for the money. The majority of users become performers to supplement their income, performing tasks while commuting, or during downtime at their main jobs. Sometimes, Toloka becomes a user’s main source of income.
Benefit 2: Contributing to the development of new technologies. Most of Toloka’s clients are tech developers, and crowdsourcing is an integral part of their work. 34% of performers said they enjoyed knowing they were contributing to the development of voice-command assistants, self-driving cars, search engines, chatbots, and much more.
Benefit 3: It’s fun. 25% of users think of Toloka as a kind of video game, and find the tasks they perform entertaining, educational, and even creative. One user said, “Toloka is addictive: once you start, you can’t put it down.”
Benefit 4: Making the world a better place. It’s nice to be part of something bigger. For 24% of users, using Toloka is a way to contribute to improving the world. They get to help clear irrelevant content out of search engines, protect people from spam, and more.
Benefit 5: Becoming self-employed. Toloka provides many people with an opportunity to become self-employed. In that official status, you are considered a business owner and can make use of all the benefits that brings with it, like tax write-offs, better credit, and opportunities for higher-paying tasks.
Benefit 6: Good career prospects. If you want to become an IT specialist, performing Toloka tasks can give you the experience to start you on that path. Certain tasks are only entrusted to experienced Tolokers with a high QA rating. They gain experience creating training datasets for ML models, which is in high demand in tech companies.
Benefit 7: Working for Toloka can be a good deed. For example, Toloka performers can be part of a project that helps find missing people. The users look at frames photographed by special search party drones, and mark the ones where there is a person in the shot. In 2021, Tolokers scanned over 330,000 images, and found more than 49,000 people in them. This allowed the search party to save 330 work days, as each 500 photos uploaded to Toloka free up between 4 and 8 work hours for 3-5 search volunteers.
Benefit 8: Toloka is a community. The platform is registered on all social media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub – so you can interact with your colleagues and form connections.
Benefit 9: Training your brain. Some users see working with Toloka as a way to expand their horizons and keep their mind more focused. People who have a sedentary lifestyle, or are limited in their movements, can exercise their brains, while also coming into contact with the broader world, through Toloka.
Benefit 10: Doing what you love. Some performers said that Toloka allows them to do exactly the types of tasks they enjoy (like editing text, for example), and they get to hone their skills in these types of tasks, which helps them at their main jobs.
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