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Post details: Mechanical Turk (again) - Why can it only be used by Americans?

07/23/2010

Mechanical Turk (again) - Why can it only be used by Americans?

I must say that a service like Amazon's Mechanical Turk really fascinates me. I already wrote a blog article some days ago where I explain how it works. I'm not sure how Amazon is making money out of this. I think that they will keep a commission on the paid rewards that a requester pays out for the workers.

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With small amounts of like one to five cent per task, but with 60,000 to 100,000 tasks available, it really looks like a big money machine. I wanted to dig deeper into the requester's side of the game after I did some research as a worker already.

I was really surprised when I tried to register for an requester account. It seems that Amazon do not accept requesters from outside the US. This is really a pity because now I can't find out how the other side works in detail.

Anyway, I wonder if there would not be any demand for such a service outside the USA. I believe there are many companies in Europe or somewhere else in the world (like Canada or Australia) who could use a service like this. I wonder if I should start programming such a service on my own but I'm afraid that here in Germany I will need more lawyers than programmers to get this up an running. Nonetheless, if there are lawyers around (or other non-programmers like designers or marketers) who would be interested in building a system like this, feel free to contact me. I have no money that I can shell out for this but I can do the programming. Just let me know what you think. You can send an email to heddesheimer@gmail.com or just post a comment.

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