Amazon Mechanical Turk fees soon to double or even quadruple

requester.mturk.com

4 pointschbrown3 comments

Well, they unionized.

What do you mean? None of the extra charge is going to the workers. Amazon is simply taking a larger cut of every transaction. If anything, this may put downwards pressure on worker wages as employers pass on this new fee increase to their workers.

As a semi-regular user of MTurk, I find this new pricing excessive. Most products grow its revenues by acquiring more users instead of jacking up the pricing. I don't understand why Amazon needs MTurk bootstrap its new features growth. Surely, this is a relatively small team compared to Amazon's main products?

Well, to answer your question, Amazon must have figured out that researchers will pay quadruple or even orders of magnitude more for this service, because these costs are fairly transparent to people outside of science. They know a certain large segment of their customer base is willing to shoulder much higher fees for this.

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