

Mechanical Turk: Profitable or Not? - alecco
http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2009/03/mechanical-turk-profitable-or-not.html

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dmv
_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.

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streety
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.

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eru
Perhaps some weird law about money laundering?

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streety
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.

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jack_cheng
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.

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trickjarrett
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.

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

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vaksel
its profitable, just not scaled to mega profits yet

