It is easy to take for granted the work that goes into what appears, seemingly effortlessly, on our screens. The moderators keeping local Facebook groups in order, the Wikipedia editors filling in gaps in our knowledge, the writers and creators on Instagram, YouTube, Substack and elsewhere keeping us entertained and informed, the activists organising online campaigns. Underneath this, the volunteers creating and maintaining software and internet standards that keep the whole show on the road; those whose work is “the reason why you can connect to WiFi to check your email in any coffee shop, regardless of whether Samsung or Apple manufactured your mobile phone.”1 Beyond this, there are the estimated 75 million workers in the global platform marketplace - from Uber drivers, to freelance translators on Upwork, to the many outsourced tasks such as labelling images handled on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT).2 This segment contains some of the most unfairly treated and exploited online workers. As Phil Jones writes, the model of the likes of AMT is to “match underemployed and jobless people” with data tasks “lasting a few seconds to a few minutes” which come with “few labour rights or secure hours.”3 This is one extreme of a common experience across all the work and volunteering described above: a situation in which many are rewarded unfairly or not at all.

As it stands, things are in need of improvement. Spotify, for example, has paid artists “as little as $.0033 per stream”,4 while a study found that “even in a country with high standard wage like the U.S., [AMT] workers earn significantly less compared to the minimum wage”.5 Emerging web monetisation technology (the processes of turning site visits into a revenue stream) could open up a fairer future here, but this must be developed in a way that supports those currently most marginalised from fair payment. This affects us all, moreover: how web monetisation develops will have knock-on effects, from how we pay for and access content and services online, to what is deemed online work in the first place.