Mechanical Turk: Profitable or Not? | Hacker News Reader

Mechanical Turk: Profitable or Not?

behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com

20 pointsalecco8 comments

I should also clarify that my figures are slight underestimates of the actual figures: I can only "see" Mechanical Turk through the eyes of an average worker. So I cannot see if a requester asks multiple people to complete the same HIT and, sometimes, I cannot observe the details for HITs for which I have not passed the qualification test. I still think that the numbers will be at the same order of magnitude.

I am not sure if that's a valid assumption. Almost every HIT I've written has been at least 2x (and typically 3+x) for redundancy. It is cheaper/faster to code for consensus than verify results. I have seen several HITs for which the task is likely massively redundant.

I'm surprised that revenue is only $2k/day. I know that HITs don't cost very much but I was under the impression that the volume was considerably higher than this figure suggests.

Does anyone know why posting HITs is still US only? Expanding it internationally seems like a fairly straightforward way to increase volume.

Perhaps some weird law about money laundering?

IANAL but I don't see how this is any different than any other sort of international transaction. I can buy items from eBay sellers in the US so why can't I buy work in the US?

Having said that I'm certainly willing to attribute it to some weird legal restriction.

The article only briefly touches on the benefits Amazon gets from utilizing its own system. I'm willing to bet that the increased revenue from having richer, more properly tagged (and hence more easily-findable) product listings more than makes up for it. It'd also be nice to see the conversion rate on the'Amazon Remembers' feature for the iPhone app, which could be a good example of the upside of putting a little money into Turk.

Similar to the point I made concerning Google Reader, this service is one that so long as it is not a huge loss for them, it will probably remain around as it provides huge internal and non-fiscal profits in terms of effort and information. The fact they can open it up to the public and generate any sort of income is a good thing to atleast alleviate the costs.

Maybe we reached a point where web services assure they won't disappear in the near future.

its profitable, just not scaled to mega profits yet

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