Interviewing Workers on Mechanical Turk. How I Got the View behind the Scenes

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.

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