Definitions, not neutrality. Where a term is routinely used to mislead — and in this sector several are — the entry says so.
ABC test. A worker-classification standard used in California and several other US states: a worker is an employee unless the hiring entity proves all three of (A) freedom from control, (B) work outside the usual course of the hirer's business, and (C) an independently established trade. Prong B is the killer for a labour middleman, because organising that exact labour is your usual course of business. See The law is about to arrive.
ACV — annual contract value. What one customer pays you in a year. The most useful single number for sizing a service sold to funded startups: about $19,000 is the empirical benchmark, and it is above self-serve but below anything requiring procurement. See How much money is actually in the buyer pool.
Agent (ASC 606). The accounting conclusion that you arrange for someone else to provide a service rather than providing it yourself. Agents book net — only their fee. See principal, and GMV is not revenue.
Annualised / run rate. The most recent period multiplied up to a year. It is not revenue, it is a projection, and in this sector it is usually a projection of the best month. Treat "annualised" and "ARR" as different words: ARR implies recurrence, annualised implies nothing at all.
ARR — annual recurring revenue. Contracted revenue that renews without being re-won. Applied to project-based services revenue it is a category error, and that error is doing real work in at least one valuation in the The capital register.
ASC 606 principal vs agent. The revenue-recognition test that decides whether you report gross or net, and therefore what multiple you get. The question is control: do you control the service before it reaches the customer? Indicators are primary responsibility for fulfilment, inventory risk and price discretion. The trap: the same facts that make you a principal for accounting are the facts that make you an employer under the ABC test and a digital labour platform under EU law. See GMV is not revenue.
BPO — business process outsourcing. You take over a whole function and run it with your own employees. High revenue, low margin, priced by the public market at 0.2–0.7x revenue (Concentrix, Teleperformance, TTEC). Several companies in the The capital register are BPOs describing themselves as marketplaces. See Marketplace, staffing firm, BPO or agency.
Burn multiple. Net cash burned divided by net new ARR added. A crude but honest read on whether growth is being bought or earned.
Chaperoning. The compliance practice in expert networks of screening, briefing and sometimes monitoring expert calls to prevent disclosure of material non-public information. It is not overhead — it is a large part of what the client is actually paying 70–80% for, and it is why the rake survived four decades.
Circumvention. Two parties introduced by a marketplace transacting directly to avoid the fee. Contractually prohibited by non-circumvention clauses, practically unenforceable at scale. See Getting cut out.
Clipping. Cutting short vertical videos from podcasts, streams and interviews, posting them across many accounts, and being paid per 1,000 API-verified views against a brand-funded pool. Rates run $1–$5 per 1,000 views generally and about $25 for AI startups, which is the whole problem with the "clipping is cheap" pitch. See Paid creators, clipping and UGC ad ops.
Cold start. The problem of assembling two sides of a market when neither is useful without the other. Empirically, the cheapest solution is single-player mode at roughly 10:1 revenue-to-funding, against ~1:1 for subsidising both sides. See Which side you build first.
Content Rewards. Whop's pay-per-view clipping product, and the default venue for brand clipping campaigns. Whop takes 10% of payouts.
Contingency search. Recruiting paid only on a successful hire, typically 15–25% of first-year salary. The recruiter carries all the risk, which is why the fee is high and why fill rate determines everything. Contrast retained search. See Contingency recruiting marketplaces.
CPM — cost per mille. Cost per 1,000 impressions or views. The unit of nearly every creator and advertising comparison in the atlas, and the unit most often compared across incompatible objectives — a reach CPM and a conversion CPM are not the same thing and are routinely set beside each other. See Paid creators, clipping and UGC ad ops.
Disintermediation. Being removed from a transaction you created. The broad term; leakage is the measured version and circumvention is the contractual one. Nobody has ever measured it — see Getting cut out and What we could not establish.
Down round. A financing at a lower price than the last one. Notable in this sector for its complete absence: no confirmed down round exists in the core AI-data cohort 2024–2026. The corrections came as layoffs instead, because nobody wants to print a mark. See The capital register.
Egocentric video. First-person footage captured by cameras worn by a person, used to train robotics and vision-language-action models. The clearest documented price collapse in the atlas: it traded at "a few dollars per hour" in 2025 and is now effectively free. See Robotics teleoperation and physical-world data.
EOR — employer of record. A third party that legally employs someone on your behalf in a country where you have no entity. Priced per head — from about $599/employee/month — which makes it excellent for staffing and unusable for a crowd of five thousand. See Where the supply can legally live.
Evals / evaluations. Structured tests of model capability and safety, increasingly bought as a product from third parties. A budget line that did not exist in 2022. See Adversarial evals and red-team crowds.
Expert network. A business that recruits a specific expert for a specific client question, usually within 48 hours, and takes 70–80% of the call fee. The oldest version of the model in the atlas and the most durable rake in it — because the product was never the expert, it was recruitment speed plus compliance indemnity. See Expert networks.
Factoring. Selling your receivables at a discount to get cash now. Standard practice in staffing, and no rate for it appears anywhere in this research — the ~14.9% figure on You pay weekly, they pay in sixty days is derived from an early-payment discount, not a quoted rate.
FDE — forward-deployed engineer. An engineer who sits with the customer and makes the product work in their environment. Palantir's model, and the only proven escape from a labour multiple — but it works because the humans install a renewing licence rather than being the product. See Forward-deployed engineering.
Fill rate. The fraction of assigned roles a recruiter actually closes. For contingency work it determines everything, because it converts a headline fee into an expected value. It is also the number that decides whether Paraform's 70% split is real earnings — see What we could not establish.
Full-stack marketplace. A marketplace that also delivers the service — owning quality, pricing and the customer relationship end to end. Higher margin and higher hold than a listings marketplace, and structurally closer to an agency than the label suggests. See Marketplace, staffing firm, BPO or agency.
GMV — gross merchandise value. The total value of transactions passing through a platform. It is not revenue. In creator commerce, net revenue is typically 3–6% of it, and quoting GMV where a reader expects revenue is the most common misdirection in this sector. See GMV is not revenue.
Gross margin. Revenue minus cost of revenue, as a percentage. The single most predictive number for what multiple a business gets: below about 40%, the public market caps the revenue multiple near 1.6x, essentially without exception. See What the public market pays for labour.
Gross revenue. Everything the buyer pays you, including the part you pass straight through to a worker. Correct under principal accounting; misleading in a headline. Always ask what the net number is.
GSV — gross services volume. Upwork's term for GMV in a services marketplace. FY2025: $4.028B of GSV, $682.9M of marketplace revenue, an 18.7% take. The cleanest public illustration of the gap between the two numbers.
Hold. In this atlas's scoring, whether buyer and seller can transact around you and whether one customer leaving ends you. Five means they cannot leave; one means they meet once and you never see them again.
Impact sourcing. Deliberately recruiting a data workforce from low-income communities, usually as part of the pitch. Sama's model, and the reason its Nairobi layoffs read as more than a business event.
Invalid traffic (IVT). Bot and non-human impressions. Ran at 18.12% of impressions generally in Q1 2026 — a figure the atlas uses with a caveat, because it is general programmatic and not clipping-specific. A $1 CPM at 50% bot is a $2 CPM. See Who is actually on the other end.
Joint employer. A finding that two entities share employer obligations for the same worker. The reason routing crowd labour through a BPO does not necessarily insulate you: the EU's Platform Work Directive attaches joint-and-several liability to close exactly that workaround. See The law is about to arrive.
Leakage. Value escaping a marketplace as the two sides transact directly. The atlas's working formula: leakage ≈ value of a single relationship ÷ (frequency × switching friction). One-shot, high-ticket, low-friction is the maximum-leakage corner — which is precisely where contingency recruiting sits. See Getting cut out.
Licence-and-hire. Paying for a non-exclusive licence to technology plus hiring most of the team, instead of acquiring the company. Google/Mechanize and, in effect, Meta/Scale. It prices talent and IP, not revenue, which is why no multiple can be inferred from it. See The capital register.
Managed marketplace. A marketplace that vets supply, sets or bounds price, and takes responsibility for the outcome. The dominant form in this atlas, and the form most likely to be a principal for ASC 606 and an employer for classification at the same time.
Megaround. A financing of $100M or more. In H1 2026 megadeals captured 87.5% of all venture capital — the structural fact that makes "$510B of venture funding" a misleading TAM. See How much money is actually in the buyer pool.
Multi-homing. Supply working across several platforms at once. Cheap multi-homing caps your take rate, because the alternative is one click away. Clippers multi-home almost universally; a teleoperator trained on your rig does not.
Net revenue. What you actually keep — the fee, the spread, the margin. The only number a valuation multiple should be computed on. See GMV is not revenue.
Net-60. Payment terms giving the buyer sixty days from invoice, often from invoice acceptance rather than delivery. Against weekly crowd payouts it creates a permanent funding hole of roughly 11% of annual revenue at a 25% gross margin — which has to be funded again every time you grow. See You pay weekly, they pay in sixty days.
Non-circumvention. The contract clause prohibiting your two sides from transacting directly. Necessary, rarely enforced, and no substitute for structural friction.
1099-NEC. The US information return for non-employee compensation. The reporting threshold rose from $600 to $2,000 for payments made in 2026 — federally. Several states did not follow, which is the trap. See The law is about to arrive.
OFAC. The US Treasury office administering sanctions. Relevant to anyone paying a global crowd: screening contributors against designated-persons lists is not optional, and OFAC designated a DPRK IT-worker network in March 2026. See Who is actually on the other end.
Preference data. Human judgements about which of two model outputs is better, used to train reward models. One of the four things labs actually buy, alongside annotation, reasoning traces and environments. See Expert data for frontier labs.
Principal (ASC 606). The accounting conclusion that you control the service before it reaches the customer. Principals book gross, with worker payments in cost of revenue. Makes headline revenue look four to six times larger at the same take rate, and makes gross margin the only honest metric. See GMV is not revenue.
Rake. The fraction of a transaction the platform keeps. Interchangeable with take rate in this atlas. Bill Gurley's A Rake Too Far is the canonical warning about setting it high. See What a rake can actually be.
Red teaming. Deliberately attacking a model to find failures before release. Increasingly bought from crowds of elite jailbreakers paid in prize money — the widest inferred spread in the atlas, because the crowd's output is monetised as software rather than resold as hours. See Adversarial evals and red-team crowds.
Retained search. Executive recruiting paid in instalments regardless of outcome, typically around 33% of first-year compensation. The buyer carries the risk, which is why the fee is higher and the relationship is stickier. Contrast contingency.
RL environment. A simulated or replicated software environment in which a model is trained by doing tasks and receiving rewards. Priced at six-to-seven figures per quarter, with exclusive deals at 4–5x non-exclusive — meaning labs are increasingly paying for denial rather than for data. See Expert data for frontier labs.
RLHF — reinforcement learning from human feedback. Training a model against human preference judgements. The technique that created the modern human-data market, and the one whose partial replacement by verifiable rewards is the main threat to it. See What better models do to each layer.
Single-player mode. Building a product that is useful to one side before the other side exists — OpenTable selling reservation software, Amazon selling books. Solved cold start for 34% of the hundred largest marketplaces, at about ten times the capital efficiency of the alternatives. See Which side you build first.
SOC 2. A security-controls audit that US enterprise buyers treat as a precondition for signing. The audit itself costs $10k–$50k once; the software that prepares you for it costs $20k–$80k a year — which is the whole argument of Compliance, finance and back office in two numbers.
Spark Ads. TikTok's format for running an existing organic creator post as a paid ad. Cited as evidence that creator-made creative outperforms studio creative in a paid auction — on vendor-published data, from a vendor that sells creator content. See Paid creators, clipping and UGC ad ops.
Spread. In this atlas's scoring and in general use, the fraction of money passing through you that you keep. A staffing spread specifically means paying a worker a fixed rate and billing the client a higher one — which is what several companies in the The capital register are doing under a marketplace label.
Take rate. Net revenue divided by gross volume. The number every business in this atlas is an argument about. Above roughly 20% it survives only if you sell something other than discovery — which is why expert networks hold 70% and freight brokerage holds 8.5%. See What a rake can actually be.
Teleoperation. A human remotely controlling a robot to generate demonstration data. Buyers pay $50–$200/hour, operators receive $25–$50/hour, and the rig plus the floor space is what stops this becoming a laptop marketplace. See Robotics teleoperation and physical-world data.
UGC — user-generated content. In advertising, creator-made ad assets bought by a brand — which makes the name a misnomer, since it is commissioned work. See Paid creators, clipping and UGC ad ops and Design, video and content production.
Vendor of record. The entity that contracts with and invoices the buyer. For a European operator selling to a US lab it determines withholding, VAT treatment, liability caps and which entity gets sued. See Where the supply can legally live.
W-8BEN. The IRS form by which a non-US individual certifies foreign status. You collect it to document that a contributor performing services entirely outside the US earns foreign-source income, and therefore that no 30% withholding applies. Collect it on day one; the conclusion it defends is a sourcing rule, not a courtesy. See Where the supply can legally live.
Working capital. The cash permanently trapped between paying the crowd and being paid by the buyer. Structurally, a labour middleman is a bank lending its customers money at 0% and funding the loan with its own equity. Nobody puts this slide in a deck. See You pay weekly, they pay in sixty days.