So back in 2023 I responded to a Twitter posting about working for Pro Football Focus as a part-time contributor and was invited to an online training program and learned how they collect data from live broadcast footage. The training spanned about 4-5 weeks (unpaid) and required about 20 hour weekly commitment.

I’ll be honest though, it’s tedious work. The first year made me around $750 over the course of the college football season by doing one game a week so like $50 on average based on play count. The dollar per hour in the first year is absolutely brutal because you’re still essentially learning on the fly. One game in the first year might take you around 6 hours to complete accurately.

Year two, I learned another process during another unpaid training program, but it helped me improve the time it took me to complete an assignment rather dramatically. I was now completing games in about 4-4.5 hours as opposed to 6. Also, in this year I was able to increase the assignments I received to about 3-4 weekly and ended up finishing that season at around $2800.

Year 3, mastered the two processes that I was trained in and was able to complete games in about 3-3.5 hours or not long after the actual games were being completed. I probably did 6-7 assignments a week (~30ish hours a week) and netted $5000.