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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 in FarmVille, weapons for Mafia Wars or goods used in other games on social-media sites like Facebook Inc. Consumers will spend $1.6 billion on virtual goods in the United States 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 San Francisco technology consulting firm Focus.com, said. "We have to stop differentiating between the virtual world and the real world. The virtual world is very real."
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 a penny per tweet, or the equivalent in digital currency, says PeopleBrowsr CEO Jodee Rich.
Last year, Tina Wang, 55, started doing online work, judging search results for eBay, 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 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 is more common among younger workers.
"There will be a whole new generation of kids growing up who won't really see the difference," he said.
umm...there is something really, really wrong with this...or them...