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Scut Work 2.0: Amazon Mechanical Turk

Do you think, wages can be lower than what you have experienced by outsourcing work to foreign countries? I already have written an article on outsourcing work on the internet for project work, but could you imagine that people are willing to work for just one US-cent per several minutes of their working time?

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Yes it's possible if you post small tasks on Amazon's mechanical turk. It's a web site where people can upload small tasks that are too difficult or complicated for computers and where you need a human brain to accomplish the task. The name "Mechanical Turk" originates from the invention of a chess playing machine invented in the 18th century. They did not have number crunching super computers in this decade, so the inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen invented a mechanism where a human chess player was hidden in the machine to perform the moves.

The Modern Turk

Amazon is doing something similar with their Mechanical Turk website. If you have a task that needs to be processed by a human, you post a "Human Intelligence Task" or HIT on the site. You give it a payment price (sometimes as low as one cent, seldom over one dollar), a maximum time allowed for finishing the assignment and an expiration date. If somebody accepts the task before it expires, this person will have the allotted time to finish the task. In most cases these tasks just need a few seconds to finish them, some are more complicated and need a longer time.

Since I'm only writing about things that I really know, I tried some of these task, to see how hard or easy they are. Some require that you type some information from a business card into some prepared fields. I've also seen tasks, where you need to judge if a given text falls into a specific category. For example "is this blog post a story?" and "does this text contain offensive language?" Other tasks work with pictures or videos.

There is one task for example, where you have to choose if a picture falls into a specific category. You just have to mark all images that shows a person, a pet, a car, a view from inside a place or a vehicle or if it's "adult" material. These are types of images that they want to be marked for removal. This makes perfect sense because a computer is not (yet) able to decide these things. The HIT will pay 5 cents per completed task and there are about 15-20 images per task to process. The HIT comes with a help page that shows examples which images to accept and which to reject.

Another one is posted by a company who checks if their fast food restaurants are clean. So they post a bunch of 8-15 images taken from their surveillance cameras and the turk worker has to decide from a scale of 1 to 5 how clean the place is. In this case, the worker needs to watch an instructional video to get the qualification to accept the task. This also pays 5 cent per HIT for processing a batch of 8-15 pictures.

Qualifications

As I mentioned "qualification" before, there is a catch on some of these HITs. They can be restricted to specific qualifications. Some HITs require you to have a record of at least 95% accepted HITs. That means, if people don't work thoroughly and make mistakes, the requester can reject their work and refuse payment. The rejected HITs will show up in your statistics, so if you have too many tasks rejected, you may not be able to accept HITs that require a minimum value here.

Some tasks have qualification tests, these can include multiple choice questions but for some more complicated tasks you need to go through a test like english spelling and grammar. For doing transcripts of audio files, you often need to transcribe a sample audio and the result will be rated automatically by software (which is not always fair, because they count every mistyped punctuation mark and if you won't get the correct spelling for filling words like uh, em, err.)

Especially audio transcripts are very challenging. They usually pay around 50-80 cents per 2 minute audio, but as far as I have seen (or better: heard), these are usually very difficult like school children in a noisy environment, all speaking at the same time. I believe that professional transcription companies use the mechanical turk on all audio that they can't figure out by themselves. If you check the market prices for audio transcription services (look for the prices for difficult audio material), you will see that this seems to be a great business model.

You might think: "but they need to check later if the transcription is correct, don't they?" OK, now comes the freaky part of all this. The same requesters who upload the audio transcriptions, also have tasks to rate the quality of an audio transcription. This can be done automatically by software. They just split up the audio into small chunks like 20 seconds and add the transcribed text to it. Then they ask the turk worker to rate the quality of the work for a reward of 2 cent per audio snippet. This way, the complete process can be performed without any human interaction on the requester's side.

How to work?

So what do we learn about this? If you get bored enough and if you don't have any other work to do, it's a great time filler. You do the easy task and get paid a few cents for doodling around. Just make sure you deliver all of it accurately and you may even get addicted if the task is easy and you don't need to think too much. It's definitely better than wasting your time on facebook or farmville, because facebook won't pay you for checking out other people's walls.

Some of the tasks can even be used to practice some skill that you would like to practice anyway. For me, the task about judging the stories is a good practice for understanding English, so I like to do this and get paid in the process. Other tasks are just boring but if you treat it like a game (Hey! Let's find some litter in this restaurant) it may qualify as a good pastime while you're waiting for a call-back from your customer.

Would it be a good idea to post your own tasks there? Maybe. I haven't tried that yet, but if I do, I will write another article and let you know what I think.

Tips for workers

Anyway, here are some tips for workers who want to earn some money using this platform:

1. Beware of signing contracts for a low-paid task. I have seen page-long contracts for accepting a simple audio transcription where I should agree to be liable for any damage if I misunderstand a word in the audio. You should never agree to a contract like this if you won't get paid a reasonable fee.

2. Some tasks have problems sending the results to the server if you use a plugin to prevent XSS (cross-site-scripting) vulnerabilities to your browser. For example the plugin "noscript" for firefox has XSS protection turned on. For some tasks you need to turn off XSS protection temporarily (under options, advanced, xss) due to the technical nature of sending web page results embedded in the Mechanical Turk website via an iFrame (OK that's geek speak and you don't have to understand the problem in all detail, just be aware that a problem exists). So, always make sure you turn on XSS protection when you are finished with your work and visit other websites with your browser.

3. Your work may get rejected by the person who did submit the task. There is no way to find out afterwards what the task was about if you do a lot of them. You can contact the requester though, but there is no guarantee that you'll get an answer. So it's a good idea to do only a few tasks for a new requester and see if they got accepted. If you end up with a lot of rejected tasks, your performance statistics may suffer so that you won't get more of the good tasks in the future until you get up to a certain percentage again. Most tasks have a requirement of at least 95% accepted HITs.

4. Check your account frequently. Some requesters don't check their tasks for a long time and you won't get paid until a task is approved. You don't want to waste your time for tasks that will hang around in the queue for several weeks, so if you see that a requester did not approve your task after a few days, don't accept any more HITs from this person.

5. Make sure that the HIT is not something illegal. I have seen tasks that requires to create a mail account and then put in your credentials (username and password) into the task fields. This is something that is used by spammers who already got their IP-address banned from services like Gmail or other mail services. They try to avoid their ban by using innocent people to feed them with fresh mail accounts for their shenanigans. You should always report these tasks. There is a link on the lower end of the page "Report this HIT", so that you can make sure that illegal tasks will be removed by Amazon from their service.

6. Don't give away too much data. Some "tasks" will just lure you to a website where you should enter your private data or your email address. These are often higher priced (around 20 cent) to make them more attractive. Be careful what you give away, most of these email collecting sites are just created to collect data for spam.

If you are interested to learn more about my experience with the mechanical turk, feel free to talk to me. You can contact me via e-mail at heddesheimer@gmail.com or you can post a comment directly under this blog entry.

Additional Information

I have to add one thing at last: All this hard earned money cannot be cashed out in all countries. Only within the USA you can get a check, in other countries, you can transfer the money to an Amazon gift certificate, so you can use it buy stuff from Amazon. Anyway you have to pay taxes for these earnings. Just a few days after I started using Mechanical Turk, I had to fill out my tax information on the Amazon Mechanical Turk site.

07/16/2010 12:59:48, von Marian , 1760 words, 7411 views   Categories: Articles, quick tips

4 comments

Comments, Pingbacks:

Comment from: clear face [Visitor] · http://clearface.net

Very interesting but the payment system they have set up is not very good lol.
They should really switch it around lol.

Because a few cents doesn't mean very much to an American, plus it's taxed.

However, in some countries a few cents for these minimal tasks are great but instead of getting the money they get a gift card lol.

Shouldn't the American who a few bucks wouldn't mean much to get the gift card instead being that they'd rather get some cheap item instead of a few dollars that will get taxed anyway???

08/10/2010 @ 08:28

Comment from: Marian [Member] · http://www.heddesheimer.de

Yes, I agree with you. Especially here in German these payments are not very much and the gift certificate can only be redeemed at amazon.com and not here in Germany at amazon.de.

Anyway, I'm doing some of these tasks when I'm bored or if I find some work that is good practice for me (like transcribing English text).

With the gift certificate I can order books from amazon USA. This will include high shipping costs but if I'll sum it up to $100 for an order, the cost is about the same as ordering the books here in Germany at their higher list price.

08/10/2010 @ 10:10

Comment from: acne treatments that work [Visitor]

Doesn't sound like a whole lot of work but the pay doesn't sound all that thrilling lol :p

I guess if you did many of these "mini" projects it would however start to add up.

08/30/2010 @ 14:04

Comment from: Marian [Member] · http://www.heddesheimer.de

yes it does add up in deed. I just ordered my first books from amazon.com using the money from that gift certificate account. I'm now thinking about getting a kindle

08/30/2010 @ 14:55