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by Francis
(July 13, 2012)

Now here is an interesting theory.

“The discussion about the overly low prices on Mechanical Turk focuses on the fact that there are many more workers on Mechanical Turk than employers.”

It seems that doing work and completing a task on Mechanical Turk is easier than putting up a job on Mechanical Turk.

On the other hand, to work on amazon Turk and actually earn some money, you need a US bank account.

I have already showed you how to post a job even if you are not based in the US.

So, this sort of argument does not really work out.

But even if it is true that the work force in Mechanical Turk is huge, I do not think that if there were more employers, prices would change much.

If Mechanical Turk was just to become explosively more popular overnight and indeed ten times as much employers start posting mini jobs on Mechanical Turk, there would just be more workers to do the jobs.

Won’t there?

In my opinion it is simply a free market.

Although the discussion changed my views about minimal wages quite a lot, I still think that the prices on Mechanical Turk, for example for completing a single survey, need to be as low as they are.

If someone wants his survey completed a hundred times, he just cannot afford to pay a dollar for each survey. Such simple jobs will always be this cheap.

The question is “do the workers have a choice to complete these tasks?”

If they see, “Complete my survey for 5 cents”
Are they forced to do that?

Wouldn’t there be many more opportunities to work online and make money except for this one?

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Read what my virtual assistant thinks for this theory:

“I agree with the above theory to some extent.

The quantity of providers are rapidly increasing with every passing day and majority of the new comers are students and even minors from poor countries.

$1 for one hour’s work is a pretty handsome money for such persons who apparently do not have any financial or domestic commitments.

Therefore employers are getting benefit from this demand and supply conflict by hiring people at low prices.”

Comments for Prices on Mechanical Turk are so low because there are not enough buyers for all the workers

by Francis
(July 13,2012)

I don’t see a reality yet where someone with a fixed job runs off to go on Mechanical Turk to make some extra money. For that it really does not pay enough.

And if they do well this sort of distraction is at the same level than checking your Facebook account all the time. People who work at their desk do this regularly and no one cares.

How would It can be different if someone would play Farmville on Facebook, text with their girlfriend or logged into Mechanical Turk to conduct surveys.

How would this make any difference?

If someone is not doing his job well, then you risk losing it of course.

In my opinion, the Mechanical Turk service does not change anything about that.

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Read My VA’s point of view about this topic:

I totally agree with you. Work is work and a hobby is hobby. You can enjoy your work but to some extent and not as much as you enjoy your hobbies. I would never do any such job for the sake of my hobby. After all money would be the “deciding factor”.

For example: I was appointed for a job to surf internet through Stumbleupon, I chose the interests of my own choice and started surfing it. It was an interesting job for me for the first two or three days but after that it was like a normal job and I did not have any extra fascination for it now.

Professional soccer players or any other sports personal initially started their careers as a hobby but when their hobby becomes their profession and even they are also getting very high amount of money for their hobby, they would not consider it as a hobby. They will always take it as a profession.

Comments for People will more and more be distracted from work to make additional pennies on amazon Mechanical Turk.

by Francis
(July 04, 2012)

In my overview post I did not yet explain step by step how you continue when the job is done. Let me do that for you now.

You can see here that some tasks are not done and are waiting for completion

But one task has been reviewed and is ready to be exported to wherever you want to results to be.

Click on results to get what you paid for and only if you have saved it safely on your hard drive (and perhaps make a backup copy on your Dropbox) – only then click on delete.

Warning:

You won’t get your results back if you deleted them prematurely!

Then, click on results and then you will see NOTHING.

Here it is a little bit tricky and you have to know this about Mechanical Turk:

You need to click on “Filter Results” and then click on approved projects to get all the results where you have clicked approve after you checked them.

Now you can see the results. Since you checked them already you can either go into the results and mark, copy and paste everything. Or, you can also download the results as an Excel-sheet.

If you make hundreds of thousands of HITs you can stream-line the approval and rejection process with this Excel-sheet:
Just download it, approve or reject, while following the instructions within the Excel-sheet and then upload it again.

(Personally, I have never done this because I limit my HITs to a maximum of ten per job.)

You can download the results as an Excel-sheet, but in case you do HITs which are text based
they might look a little bit screwed and weird.

Good luck working through all of this!

Better Way to Handle This:

For text based HITs, it is in general better to click and copy paste each hit one at a time into a word file. This will save you some trouble.

By the way, if one worker has done an exceedingly good job, you can give him a bonus when you approve his work. Or, if someone does exceedingly bad job, you can ban him.

The worker does not leave a name and you should not ask for a real name. This can get you banned from amazon Mechanical Turk!

The only thing you get is an ID. Unfortunately I haven’t yet worked out how to contact a worker using this ID alone.

Perhaps you can help me out…?

Just jump into the discussions and comments!

Comments for Managing Your Results from Finished Work on Mechanical Turk

by Francis
(July 03, 2012)

I have done some tasks on Mechanical Turk and since I have showed you some basics about the service from amazon, I wanted to know:

• How the workers live?
• What money they made?
• What was interesting at their jobs?
• Why they did it?

 

Easiest Solution!

Post a HIT about an interview from these workers.

The first try was asking for 80 cents for 300 words of original content by workers from the US only.

Please see my other posts about what exact job description I used.

Then I went and took a shower. 😉

Twenty minutes later, three excellent results were posted. I checked them all through Copyscape and the results were pretty good. Found no problem with word count and originality.

So, I gladly paid those 80 cents. But if it works this easily, this is a great sign for you that you can go down a little with the price! Perhaps it’s so easy to do because people just can talk off the top of their head.

In fact, if you look at the results below, the average time per assignment and effective hourly rate, You can see that I have effectively paid them $5 per hour for their efforts.

So these 80 cents turn into something much more concrete, moneywise.

Still, I am happy with the results. And you hopefully will be happy with the case studies to read – and the workers at amazon Mechanical Turk I have hired are also happy.

A win-win-win situation! 🙂

Or what do you think?

Tell us in the comments.

Interviewing Workers from the Outside of the US about Mechanical Turk

by Francis
(July 06, 2012)

Since my experiment with workers from the US writing 300 words about their experience for eighty to fifty cents worked out so well, I thought about trying this out to countries outside of the US.

For this, I simply changed my qualification criteria to “Location score is not United States”

I also added “the number of approved HITs must be greater than 50” to screen for only experienced workers from outside the United States.

I diminished my pay rate for each HIT drastically to 20 cents and I am looking forward to see what is happening…

Don’t start throwing stones at me now! Outside of the US, the pay rate can be chosen to be lower because the cost of life outside of the US, for example in India, is much lower.

The results of my screening:

People where happy to complete my HITs in less than one hour. Even the HITS for 20 cents for 300 words article written from outside of the US were completed. As expected, the level of the English language was a little less good.

However, the workers – who all were from India – did a pretty solid job. And it was interesting to read about the conditions under which Indians use Mechanical Turk.

Bottom line of finding the best price?

When choosing a price for your hits, do not forget to play around with the price a bit.

• Start with the amount of money which you think is right.
• and then gradually decrease to the optimal price where the quality of the work still is satisfactory to you – and your credit card. 😉

In general, I think that you will get the best results for a good price from writers from the US only. But it often pays to ADD some results from outside of the US for the fraction of the price.

If I asked for 3 reviews from the US for 50 cents each (1.5$ in total), it’s not much of an investment to add 3 reviews from India (for an additional 60 cents) to round things up a bit.

Comments for Interviewing Workers from the Outside of the US about Mechanical Turk

Jun 02, 2014

Newbie on a hunt by: CerseiOh, I see you handle your outsourcing stuff pretty good. Might as well take some lessons from you or I will try it out for myself; like taking myself to a new adventure. Thanks for the tip!