More Businesses Outsourcing Online Jobs to Small Town USA

The practice of "ruralsourcing," or outsourcing jobs to small and rural communities within the United States, is a trend that's now taking hold with an increasing number of businesses. According to a recent report by global employment platform oDesk, which measures the state of the online workforce on a monthly basis, small towns (those with populations of 15,000 or less) have outpaced larger cities in terms of online worker activity.

ODesk's latest Online Employment Report, which measured activity in January, shows that small towns in the United States meet or exceed big city counterparts in the number of online workers per capita. Additionally, the number of hours worked per online contractor was much higher in small towns, with the average small town contractor working 175 hours in January, compared to those for online workers in New York (70), San Francisco (54), and Los Angeles (23).

Demand is also growing for online work within the United States, and according to oDesk, January broke a record with 71,000 online job opportunities posted. The most popular categories for online contract work were in Web programming and design, blog and article writing, SEO and data entry, as well as Web research and mobile apps. Overall, businesses spent more than $13 million for online contract work in January alone. "Workers in small towns need access to jobs, and the Internet can put them in consideration for job opportunities on a global scale," oDesk CEO Gary Swart recently told Small Business Trends.