Want to work at Amazon? Now you can, answering incredibly mundane questions that computers aren’t generally very good at. I decided to try out Amazon Mechanical Turk, a service which allows programmers or others with hard questions for computers but easy questions for the human mind to interact with anonymous humans. This is a cool idea, but the implementation of it is a little unfair; now I know how HAL felt.

I’ve being doing their requests for the past two hours (no breaks), and I’ve made a whopping $4.45. And I worked hard, honestly, and diligently. An example problem was to read a review of some piece of consumer electronics or other and make a list of the features mentioned. This paid $0.04 per review. Some of the reviews were simple enough, but some were rambling, 250 word explications of every pro and con of every feature. I would say between the really terse ones and the really verbose ones, I averaged 30 seconds per review. That’s $4.80/hour, but I was only able to do it half an hour before they started showing me the same reviews over and over. It would’ve been possible to submit repeat answers, but my answers most likely would’ve been rejected. I thought I would try to find something more profitable, but as it turns out, the comment reading job is about as good as it gets. I took some less exciting $0.02 tasks which actually took longer to complete.

The buyers’ ability to reject vendors’ responses is another “feature” designed to screw the crowd, especially considering that common questions like “write a 500 word essay about (fill in the blank)” go for about $3 and can be rejected. Do you really want to write 500 words for $3, but only if the buyer thinks your essay is good enough? Considering that the buyer can view your complete answer, and presumably copy it in some way, the answer should probably be a sound no.

Other things you can do currently on Mechanical Turk include writing short blog articles for $0.30 each and put a comedy video on a “high profile website” for $1.00. That’s right, some people think that copy writing is worth $0.30/per article and that an embedded video on a high profile website is worth $1.00. This is what shocked me most, since this isn’t really a repeatable micro-task like Mechanical Turk was built for (how many faces are in this picture?) but genuine requests for offensively cheap creative efforts and very valuable marketing space.

It’s worth noting that the people willing to work for my two hour average of $2.25 per hour are generally not located in English speaking nations, and that English was a requirement of all the projects I worked on. Besides, few of the projects had enough HITs (Amazon’s unit of work) available to sustain one worker for an eight hour day. The one saving grace for Mechanical Turk is that the people willing to do the work can accept or reject the rates offered, making this a pretty effective free market. The buzz around the topic currently is still strong enough that enough curious people like me will get in and do a little work, but I suspect that as more work hits the system (increased demand) and people lose interest in really mundane labor (decreased supply) the price of each tiny little menial task will skyrocket, and the absolutely outlandish requests for long essays and nearly free advertising will all but vanish.

Tags: Amazon, Crowdsourcing, Enlightening, offensive, Web

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 9:02 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.