05/07 - Sunny Sunday!

IMO It allows places like Prolific to exist on the fringes, but tbh there's no real alternative to mTurk in existence. There are a few niche sites that "do the same thing" but not at the scale (and affordability) that mTurk provides. And certainly not with the integration to the rest of the AWS offerings which has been Amazons big selling point of late.

For sites not named mTurk processing payment fees eat a lot of the profit you'd expect them to make, so mTurk charging higher fees gives them the buffer room needed to exist (mTurk probably doesn't suffer this problem since they own the payment processing company).

Take Prolific, they charge 12.5% + 10p (which means quite often at least another 10%+ for any tasks $1 or less). That's 22%, which is higher than mTurk but they probably make less pure profit since the equation is somewhat close to: their fee - (incoming TOTAL processing fees [~3%+x-cents] + outgoing payment fees [3% + x cents]) - they get booty blasted on both ends which is why they've now passed that on to their workers they care oh so much about (On Prolific, we endorse the principle of 'ethical rewards'.)

Other sites I've seen follow similar models of charging "requesters" (whatever they may be named there) and also struggle with the double booty bangery problem.

I'd actually love to see how it all works on a tax form since they've got huge $ amounts coming in but the majority of it goes right back out. I think its pretty interesting when you take it from the platform's perspective.

 

PROLIFIC STUDY Title: Judging Information from the Media Hosted by : Colin Holbrook Reward : £ 1.00 Avg. Reward Per Hour : £8.58/hr Available Places : 49/250 Maximum Allowed Time : 30mins Avg. Completion Time : 7mins

 

The manufacturers are the ones that offer them though, not Newegg. It just so happened that one of the components had one. Newegg gives a $50 discount for buying the combo so it's a total of $70 off regular price after MIR. But yeah, I've seen better combo deals out there.

 

Sounds like a viable workaround would be to pay your workers in Amazon giftcards, actually. However, that would limit your appeal due to being paid in Amazon giftcards, which don't buy groceries or whatnot. On the other hand, I believe that's what Princeton's "in-house" surveying site does (which, coincidentally, is why you don't see a lot of Princeton University studies anymore).

Oh, and if anyone wants the link to Princeton's site, let me know. They don't put stuff up too often and there's no way to really monitor it, and most stuff is done by lottery (10% chance of winning $10 Amazon GC, etc), but they do pay out. As you (ChrisTurk) can probably tell, that's their workaround to both mTurk charging fees, and the DP from Paypal/whatever other payment processing they wish to use.

 

I did this hit months ago, and it was a solid hit!

 

Your HIT activity for this week:
- Number of HITs submitted: 8,680

Approvals and payments that occurred this week:
- Number of HITs approved: 8,720
- Number of HITs rejected: 0
- Bonus reward earned: $22.13
- HIT reward earned: $359.71
- Total Amount earned this week: $381.84

Only 4 days worth of work.
Now I gotta go run a 12k. Make big monies

 

The problem then becomes: where do you get good workers? That really is the draw of mTurk vs trying to do something like that [hiring randoms on the Internet.. you can imagine how that goes], there is nothing on the Internet more publicized than it as a complete platform - and as much as we harp on quals and stuff being a giant scam, the idea behind them is great. As a requester you're getting to steal years of worker qualification data from other businesses for free (or a nominal to them price in the case of "premium" quals).

Most requesters at the very least start on mTurk and then recruit workers off-platform to get away from the 20%+ fees.

Re: giftcards specifically - there is no free (or even remotely cheap) API to purchase giftcards available to small-medium sized operations (I've looked.. a lot start out as $50,000+ volume/yr) which means having to manually purchase/send them out which is icky and very difficult to streamline elegantly into any "payments solution."

If someone knows a good giftcard API that isn't ludicrously expensive by God let me know because I couldn't find it and would have use for it.

 

Your HIT activity for this week:
- Number of HITs submitted: 1,962
Approvals and payments that occurred this week:
- Number of HITs approved: 1,301
- Number of HITs rejected: 2
- Bonus reward earned: $2.20
- HIT reward earned: $245.85
- Total Amount earned this week: $248.05


....

Pending earnings [ Last updated: 11 seconds ago ] $171.07

 

What were the rejections if you don't mind me asking?

 

Title: Identify if Title Matches the Image(Image Audit) | PANDA Worker: Preview | Accept | Requester Requester: Amazon Requester Inc.- PN MAC [A3JRJWPK739YE3] (Contact) TO 1: [Pay: 3.00] [Fast: 5.00] [Comm: 0.00] [Fair: 5.00] [Reviews: 2] [ToS: 0] TO 2: Not Available Description: Choose whether or not a title matches an image Time: 60 minutes HITs Available: 443 Reward: $0.01 Qualifications: Total approved HITs is greater than 1000; Masters has been granted; HIT approval rate (%) is greater than 95;

Noveau CI's.

 

one was from a batch and i accidentally submitted a hit totally blank by hitting enter, totally my fault. and the other was a survey that didn't give me a completion code, but the req is "trying to figure out how" to reverse it. yesterday they said they're having amazon do it manually, so ...

 

Did you ask them to check that their account as the $ to pay you? Because that's usually the issue from what I've gotten.

 

yeah, the survey is still up so i figure they still have money in the account. it's been since thursday, so getting a little bit antsy, haha.

 

pfjfffft

I've had four requesters feed me that line within the last year. good luck though

 

You have to threaten to murder their family pet.. that really gets the motivation fire burning.

(this is 100% a joke please don't be mean to requesters/people in general)

 

Title: 20 minute research study (~ 20 minutes) | PANDA Requester: MPR Lab [AI2G5V8H1U52N] (TO) TO Ratings: ★★★★★ 4.38 Communicativity ★★★★★ 4.04 Generosity ★★★★★ 4.82 Fairness ★★★★★ 4.80 Promptness Number of Reviews: 116 | TOS Flags: 0 Submit a new TO review Description: Participate in a research task Time: 60 minutes HITs Available: 11 Reward: $3.50 Qualifications: Exc: [42843-42254] has not been granted;Location is one of: US;Inc: [19-42254] has been granted