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How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

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Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#51

Post by sureaboutthis »

prepend wrote: post #39
ptero wrote: post #19

The person described is a "senior business analyst", reportedly making good money, but decides to work on MTurk, doing menial tasks, to help offset extra costs (diapers, etc.) of a baby that was born. This sounds insane to me. Almost anything else sounds better: reduce expenses, figure out if he can get more responsibilities and a raise, even get a low % credit to pay for those diapers for a year, etc. . Is this just…

All the things you mention are not exclusive to MTurk. So he could do those and make a few hundred extra. I view this as passive time where spending a few hours while watching tv, or rocking the baby, or whatnot seems acceptable to some people. Many free to play games have the same attention span requirements and they don’t pay anything.

It's not that easy. You do have to pay attention and, if you think you can mindlessly click on anything and get away with it, you're wrong. There are tests and traps to make sure you aren't doing that.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#52

Post by probably_wrong »

namanyayg wrote: post #40
probably_wrong wrote: post #13

I had to do some digging into crowdsourcing for my PhD thesis, and these numbers are well reported in the literature. Our group made the calculations to ensure that our task would pay at least minimum wage. As a result, we had to throttle our participants because they would hit our servers pretty hard. That's not to say that the experience was easy - we had to implement every possible sanity check, and even then we e…

What kind of sanity checks did you implement, or how did you know what data to throw?

We had an interactive task (hosted in our own server) and a questionnaire afterwards. Sanity checks off the top of my head:

* Control words: our server gave them two (unique) control words (one for joining, one for winning), and we asked for them in the post-task questionnaire. Some of these words ended up being reused among several participants, even from participants that never even started the task.

* IP checks: we had an experiment that you could "win" (and earn a bonus), but you only were allowed to play once. Some people restarted the task several times, so we only used the first attempt in a sequence (as reported by their IP and timestamp).

* Data thrown away: we further removed data where we had more than one player per IP (to control for both multiple accounts per person and use of proxies), experiments that were way too fast, and experiments with unsupported browsers (which we explictly mentioned in the description).

Regarding money, we were not allowed by the TOS to withold payment to anyone that filled the questionnaire, even if we knew they did it in bad faith. We therefore implemented the "winning" bonus, and also gave bonus to people who lost but really tried.

I want to point out that a LARGE percentage of participants played honestly, and some of their data was thrown away only out of an abundance of caution. Once you keep the first bad apples out, they simply move to other, easily-exploitable tasks.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#53

Post by mruts »

Ma8ee wrote: post #31
blueboo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We believe it's insane and dismiss it out of hand because we all realize Mechanical Turk doesn't pay a living wage in the developed world. But I dunno, I feel OK with the premise that this guy reduced his expenses and optimized his career as much as he could. Say you did all that and had a few hours a week you wanted to use to make your household budget a bit healthier...getting paid for some kind of remote work via…

Yes, but someone who calls himself a BA should be able to get better return for his time.

He probably can but MTurk is superior because of liquidity and flexibility. There are very few jobs in which value is created and paid for in a span of a minute. By turning dead time into money, generating money in a way you could not for other jobs.

And a BA isn’t worth much regardless. Half the people I knew in college now work at coffee shops.

A general good rule is what when you see someone do something, there’s probably a, if not good, understandable reason for it.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#54

Post by ptero »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #46
ptero wrote: post #19

The person described is a "senior business analyst", reportedly making good money, but decides to work on MTurk, doing menial tasks, to help offset extra costs (diapers, etc.) of a baby that was born. This sounds insane to me. Almost anything else sounds better: reduce expenses, figure out if he can get more responsibilities and a raise, even get a low % credit to pay for those diapers for a year, etc. . Is this just…

I guess the article doesn't say it well, but this can be done in small scraps of time from wherever you currently are under circumstances where making money with a "regular job" would not be possible. If you make, say, an extra $5/day on what used to be your smoke breaks and lunch hour at work for an 8-5 job, you have an extra $180 or so a month without any additional overhead (for uniforms, whatever), scheduling con…

Fair enough, but there are risks there, too. Not claiming that it is necessarily the case, but when one has a fixed income job and a variable income one, effort and attention tends to skew to a variable one (you get soame $$ from the other one regardless). So your main job (promotions, etc.) can suffer.

And for a long game one will likely get much further by investing in primary job or developing new skills (teaching math to kids, home improvements, whatever) that gets them out of competing with millions of unskilled, low wage participants in MTurk.

I view MTurk as temporary fix for desperate times only. My 2c.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#55

Post by brighter2morrow »

londons_explore wrote: post #20
ptero wrote: post #19

The person described is a "senior business analyst", reportedly making good money, but decides to work on MTurk, doing menial tasks, to help offset extra costs (diapers, etc.) of a baby that was born. This sounds insane to me. Almost anything else sounds better: reduce expenses, figure out if he can get more responsibilities and a raise, even get a low % credit to pay for those diapers for a year, etc. . Is this just…

Some MTurk tasks are amenable to sub-contracting out or writing bots to mostly or fully automate. If he does that, I could see it being competitive on an hourly basis to a regular job.

As someone who regularly purchases work from MTurk, some rando's crumby bot is absolutely not what I'm looking for. We're training our own AI from MTurk responses, and we're sending to MTurk difficult edgecases that our own AI gets wrong.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#56

Post by mruts »

s_Hogg wrote: post #16

Related to this, Stanford created something so you can use Mechanical Turk without being overly exploitative (ensures you pay at least US$15/hr): https://fairwork.stanford.edu/

I like the idea of having the market decide what is fair, instead of some Stanford website.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#57

Post by nl »

dsr_ wrote: post #48
wsc981 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 USD per hour can be decent depending the location. Where I live in Thailand people on average make 7 USD per day.

Do the people in Thailand who make $7/day generally have reliable access to the Internet for 8 hours a day, with a cost for network access and smartphone under $8/day? And a ready source of loans to cover the initial purchase? And can they read English?

Yes.

You will probably get better English skills in Philippines or India, but the economics are similar.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#58

Post by mruts »

jmnicolas wrote: post #38
Thorrez wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep >“Most people’s first mistake is they go on there and accept any task they see,” says Naab. “They’ll do these transcriptions — $0.01 to transcribe a whole receipt for Expensify. That’s a terrible ROI.”

It depends, $0.01 might be worth something in a very poor country. But on the other hand if you have access to a computer a poor country, 1 cent might not be worth your time anyway.

You can use MTurk on phones I assume? Even very poor people often have smartphones and data where I am living (Tanzania).

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#59

Post by mritchie712 »

stubish wrote: post #50
blintz wrote: post #42

How do people feel about the research ethics of this? Many academic studies involve the use of MTurk participants, but it seems as though they are not being paid close to a living or even fair wage ($2 an hour is abysmal!). Should universities require that studies using MTurk pay some minimum pro-rated hourly wage? That is, if a Stanford HCI study (which seem to use MTurk often) wants workers to fill out a 15-minute…

I wonder if they actually get meaningful results from MTurk participants; you are getting a very skewed and unnatural demographic, and I don't see how any results based on feedback from MTurk participants can be applied to any normal population. Much more so than the traditional study group of students-who-need-to-pay-rent. I don't see an ethical problem in how much you pay participants (after all, how much it pays o…

I'd think it's so skewed that it makes the results worthless. I wonder if anyone's done a study on it (e.g. get an actual random US sample vs. a MTurk sample and compare the results).

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#60

Post by dahfizz »

dalbasal wrote: post #21
londons_explore wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some MTurk tasks are amenable to sub-contracting out or writing bots to mostly or fully automate. If he does that, I could see it being competitive on an hourly basis to a regular job.

How open are Amazon to this? Ooh, the idea of mTurk is "human powered." OTOH, a market for tasks that can be do e via a combination of automations and humans could be powerful.

I would assume that Amazon already does this. If a task is trivial enough for an AI, they would do it themselves and get the posters money before the job gets forwarded to the Turks.
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