9 ms·

Who Makes Below Minimum Wage on Mechanical Turk?

74 points by xacaxulu 11y ago

hugh4 11y ago
I can see some appeal to making a miniscule amount of money in my spare time on Mechanical Turk. I mean, I already spend my spare time doing pointless tasks such as solving crossword puzzles and commenting on things. I would see it as a game where the goal is to try and make as much money as possible with as little work. I can also see that unemployed people might enjoy it just as a way of feeling like they're doing something worthwhile. Certainly, since I don't need the money, I'd much rather earn $3 an hour on Mechanical Turk, sitting at home and picking and choosing what I feel like doing, than $7.25 an hour in a minimum-wage job.
- egroat 11y ago
  > Certainly, since I don't need the money, I'd much rather earn $3 an hour on Mechanical Turk, sitting at home and picking and choosing what I feel like doing, than $7.25 an hour in a minimum-wage job. You don't need the money, so the money doesn't come into it. It could read: > I'd much rather -- sit-- at home and pick-- and choose-- what I feel like doing, than -work- a minimum-wage job. The important piece here is not what the people who have time to waste are doing with job gamification, but the reasons why some people are investing significant amounts of time in a sub minimum wage system and presumably why this group has a large crossover with those using it as a primary income source. Complete speculation suggests to me that this group contains a non-trivial amount of people who are somehow "locked in" by transport, mental illness, or caring requirements yet need to earn money and are more than willing to work. I am very concerned that there are people cornered into living like this at sub-societal standards. This is not ok yet I am unsure as to how to find out if this is the case.
- chjohasbrouck 11y ago
  I tried Mechanical Turk years and years ago. At that time there were really no tasks available that paid an amount that could consistently get you anywhere close to minimum wage. The only ones that seemed appealing on the surface were these audio transcriptions. I type over 100wpm and 9 minutes of audio took me over an hour to transcribe. I got like $2, and never even bothered withdrawing it. If any individual on Mechanical Turk is averaging even 1/3rd federal minimum wage, I'd be shocked. Since most of the tasks pay even far worse than transcription, and there's a significant unpaid time investment acquiring the tasks and getting them approved, and most people probably try a few tasks before leaving and never even ask for a check, I'd guess the average payout for people working on Mechanical Turk is much less than a dollar per hour. I've always wondered how it's legal.
  - iopq 11y ago
    I've read some articles about it and most people who make $5 an hour or more tend to choose tasks efficiently that they can complete quickly without spending too much attention on. If you rush through easier tasks you can complete them in a few minutes doing a good enough job to get paid.
  - icelancer 11y ago
    >If any individual on Mechanical Turk is averaging even 1/3rd federal minimum wage, I'd be shocked. Look at the transcriptions / translations for Farsi and languages from the Middle East. People are making plenty of money.
  - mc808 11y ago
    I used to do data entry and transcription for $12/hour (not adjusted for 15+ years of inflation) and was able to reach about $4-5/hour on Mechanical Turk when I tried it. As I was out of practice, I think $7/hour would be feasible with time. But one thing people forget is that the federal minimum wage is actually closer to $8/hour when you include the doubling of FICA taxes on self-employment income. Still, the ability to login and earn even $5/hour at arbitrary times of the day may be desirable for a segment of the population that's perhaps a bit asocial and chooses an RV lifestyle.
lqdc13 11y ago
>>>$1.13 for writing a verbatim transcript of a 4 minute and 2 second audio clip What? That's actually pretty good...
- JamesMcMinn 11y ago
  Well, given that the average speaking speed is 150wpm, whilst average typing speed is only 40 wpm, it probably takes ~15 minutes to transcribe each audio clip, giving about $4.5/hour, which isn't so great.
  - lqdc13 11y ago
    This is like the worst case scenario. If the person can touch type or if there are major pauses during the recordings (which happens a lot during lectures), you make $15/hr. If there are enough pauses, you can do two at a time and get $30/hr.
    - sp0rk 11y ago
      Your estimations are incredibly generous, even for somebody using a transcription pedal. The audio for the transcription jobs on sites like MTurk is often very low quality and recorded on a device that is clearly not close to the speaker(s). They are also often for things like local government meetings where the speakers are using a lot of proper nouns that you may not be familiar with. Both of these factors result in a LOT of rewinding to listen to a word multiple times.
- anamexis 11y ago
  I did this for awhile, and it takes surprisingly long to do these transcriptions. They are mostly transcribing accident interviews for insurance companies. The recordings are absolutely terrible, so you have to re-listen to each part many times to get it right. Additionally, since it is paralegal work, there are very strict requirements for formatting and accuracy. 30 minutes spent transcribing a 4 minute audio clip would not be unusual.
  - 11y ago
amelius 11y ago
I guess the wages are low because any task has to be verified by another person (possibly in a consensus-test, where the input of the other person is verified against your input). Or at least, that's what I'm guessing.
- AJ007 11y ago
  It has been years, but when I placed projects on mturk I had them listed to be completed 2-3 times each. This was the only sane way to filter out input by users which was completely wrong. The positive thing was once you identified someone submitting non-sense you ban them from the project and pay nothing. Americans are not ready for what is going to happen to the labor market when minimum wage goes to $15 an hour.
  - eru 11y ago
    > Americans are not ready for what is going to happen to the labor market when minimum wage goes to $15 an hour. Lots of `informal' employment, I'd guess?
- zappo2938 11y ago
  Duolingo has hundreds of people translating the New York Times into several languages being paid nothing. (edit) What about people who spend hours answering questions on Stack Exchange? American's spend several hours a day watching TV. What if the service gives people a distraction that they are mentally active in? There might be several advantages other than monitory performing these tasks over passively sitting in front of a TV.
  - corysama 11y ago
    There was a stat a few years back that if we could redirect 1% of e everyone's time spent watching TV we could have a new Wikipedia-scale project every 7 weeks. Zoning out has its place, but I bet more than a few percent of TV time is raw boredom rather than relaxation.
  - xacaxulu 11y ago
cgriswald 11y ago
I'm wondering what percentage of Mechanical Turk workers are doing the work while at their primary job.
Mz 11y ago
I have never gotten into Mechanical Turk, but I do freelance work online. My "hourly wage" depends in part on how together I am. I am medically handicapped. Some days, I am fairly together and can make around $12/hour -- not dissimilar form what I was making at a corporate job after a few pay raises. On a so-so day, it can take me forever to complete tasks, lowering my "hourly wage." However, I still need the money, even if the hourly wage is not great. (Edit: On a bad day, I typically do not work. And I don't get fired for missing a lot of days. This was a constant worry at my corporate job.) Do I wish I earned more per hour? Sure. But I worry about people who want to "improve" conditions for people choosing to do this kind of work. I cannot take a normal job and have any hope of getting well and staying well. I walked away from a corporate job because it was helping to keep me sick. For me, this kind of low wage work buys me precious freedom and control over my life. If you take it from me, I am left with what? Panhandling? Prostitution? ...??? I don't know what I would be left with. But people making $100/hour should butt the hell out with their excessively privileged ideas about "good working conditions" and let people like me have some freedom to choose. It isn't like most people actually give a damn how hard life is for me or others like me.
- Frondo 11y ago
  Would you complain if, through legislation, nothing were different about your work structure, but you were in fact paid more? I.e. nothing changes but you're making $15/hour instead of $12/hour?
  - Mz 11y ago
    There is no way "nothing else" would change. And your comment is rife with assumptions that I find galling. But I don't have time at the moment to address that.
    - eru 11y ago
      Actually, there's one way to make such a change: pay everyone an unconditional basic income of, say, 24$ (= 3$ * 8h) per day. But I agree, Frondo's comment seems to be rife with assumptions.
kruhft 11y ago
A while back I was using Mechanical Turk as a source for programming problems. The major issue was that they were distributing a lot of the work to get around things like the limit of google searches one can do a day (100 I think), so once the problems were scripted, you could easily break those barriers. Certain problems were quite interesting, involving OCR and fuzzy pattern matching on google rankings, and I'm sure certain ones would make good research problems. It was fun for a few days, but even when scripted the amounts you would make were minuscule.
bandrami 11y ago
Hasn't mturk in the years since this article was written essentially frozen non-US workers out of the system?
- zo1 11y ago
  Non-us requesters, even. I just got this from their site after wanting to setup an account: """ Why is the country set as United States? At this time Mechanical Turk does not support Requesters from countries outside the United States. """
sparkzilla 11y ago
I run a crowdsourced content site that is a kind of Wikipedia for news (see my profile for link). When we first started we wanted to attract Wikipedia writers, who write for free. Those writers are mainly young, white Americans, like the Mechanical Turk writers mentioned in the article. But they wouldn't come over, because they like fighting on Wikipedia for free. So I offered $1 per post to write 50-100 words summaries of the news. Depending on the content a writer could add four to eight posts an hour, getting faster at it as they improved their skills. We had about 50 writers on the program, but could easily have had many more. We were overwhelmed with people wanting to join the program and had over 1000 people on our waiting list. At first, But the $1-per-post program attracted a whole different community: mainly women, many of them minorities, who like to work-at-home. We actually saw this as a big plus because they were no-nonsense about doing the work, and gave diversity to the content, something Wikipedia struggles with. We paid out in Paypal and some people would literally do some work so they could get some food for that day. I think too many companies think of crowdsourcing as a way to get cheap work, but it's really good to get diverse workers. After paying out $20,000 for 20,000 posts we changed to a revenue-share system, where writers earn more as the site grows. That presents a different challenge: finding writers who will put in work now, with the hope of a bigger payout later.
- ma2rten 11y ago
  How did you recruit those people?
  - sparkzilla 11y ago
    There's a large-work-at-home community on the web, with sites that list sites, as well as forums and review sites. Search under "work at home". We also got good word-of-mouth because the pay was reasonable, and the payouts were fast, although you continuously have to reassure people that it's not a scam :-(
    - zo1 11y ago
      >"although you continuously have to reassure people that it's not a scam :-(" It's unfortunate, but that is the nature of the broad term "work from home", especially on the internet. I think tech-savvy individuals have, in parallel, been constantly telling individuals that such keywords are usually scams.
ebt 11y ago
This article is from 2013, not reflected in the HN title. I seriously doubt the following statement in the article is still true: "The users of Mechanical Turk are still early adopters, which explains why so many workers are closer to the median US household income of around $50,000 than to the poverty line." I did some survey work on MT back then, it was fun for a few days, then became incredibly mind numbing. A more recent article on MT (probably posted already to HN): http://www.npr.org/2015/05/22/408680035/mechanical-turk-workers-secret-cogs-in-the-internet-marketplace http://www.npr.org/2015/05/22/408680035/mechanical-turk-work...

74 points by xacaxulu 11y ago

hugh4 11y ago

I can see some appeal to making a miniscule amount of money in my spare time on Mechanical Turk. I mean, I already spend my spare time doing pointless tasks such as solving crossword puzzles and commenting on things. I would see it as a game where the goal is to try and make as much money as possible with as little work. I can also see that unemployed people might enjoy it just as a way of feeling like they're doing something worthwhile. Certainly, since I don't need the money, I'd much rather earn $3 an hour on Mechanical Turk, sitting at home and picking and choosing what I feel like doing, than $7.25 an hour in a minimum-wage job.

egroat 11y ago
> Certainly, since I don't need the money, I'd much rather earn $3 an hour on Mechanical Turk, sitting at home and picking and choosing what I feel like doing, than $7.25 an hour in a minimum-wage job. You don't need the money, so the money doesn't come into it. It could read: > I'd much rather -- sit-- at home and pick-- and choose-- what I feel like doing, than -work- a minimum-wage job. The important piece here is not what the people who have time to waste are doing with job gamification, but the reasons why some people are investing significant amounts of time in a sub minimum wage system and presumably why this group has a large crossover with those using it as a primary income source. Complete speculation suggests to me that this group contains a non-trivial amount of people who are somehow "locked in" by transport, mental illness, or caring requirements yet need to earn money and are more than willing to work. I am very concerned that there are people cornered into living like this at sub-societal standards. This is not ok yet I am unsure as to how to find out if this is the case.
chjohasbrouck 11y ago
I tried Mechanical Turk years and years ago. At that time there were really no tasks available that paid an amount that could consistently get you anywhere close to minimum wage. The only ones that seemed appealing on the surface were these audio transcriptions. I type over 100wpm and 9 minutes of audio took me over an hour to transcribe. I got like $2, and never even bothered withdrawing it. If any individual on Mechanical Turk is averaging even 1/3rd federal minimum wage, I'd be shocked. Since most of the tasks pay even far worse than transcription, and there's a significant unpaid time investment acquiring the tasks and getting them approved, and most people probably try a few tasks before leaving and never even ask for a check, I'd guess the average payout for people working on Mechanical Turk is much less than a dollar per hour. I've always wondered how it's legal.
- iopq 11y ago
  I've read some articles about it and most people who make $5 an hour or more tend to choose tasks efficiently that they can complete quickly without spending too much attention on. If you rush through easier tasks you can complete them in a few minutes doing a good enough job to get paid.
- icelancer 11y ago
  >If any individual on Mechanical Turk is averaging even 1/3rd federal minimum wage, I'd be shocked. Look at the transcriptions / translations for Farsi and languages from the Middle East. People are making plenty of money.
- mc808 11y ago
  I used to do data entry and transcription for $12/hour (not adjusted for 15+ years of inflation) and was able to reach about $4-5/hour on Mechanical Turk when I tried it. As I was out of practice, I think $7/hour would be feasible with time. But one thing people forget is that the federal minimum wage is actually closer to $8/hour when you include the doubling of FICA taxes on self-employment income. Still, the ability to login and earn even $5/hour at arbitrary times of the day may be desirable for a segment of the population that's perhaps a bit asocial and chooses an RV lifestyle.

lqdc13 11y ago

>>>$1.13 for writing a verbatim transcript of a 4 minute and 2 second audio clip What? That's actually pretty good...

JamesMcMinn 11y ago
Well, given that the average speaking speed is 150wpm, whilst average typing speed is only 40 wpm, it probably takes ~15 minutes to transcribe each audio clip, giving about $4.5/hour, which isn't so great.
- lqdc13 11y ago
  This is like the worst case scenario. If the person can touch type or if there are major pauses during the recordings (which happens a lot during lectures), you make $15/hr. If there are enough pauses, you can do two at a time and get $30/hr.
  - sp0rk 11y ago
    Your estimations are incredibly generous, even for somebody using a transcription pedal. The audio for the transcription jobs on sites like MTurk is often very low quality and recorded on a device that is clearly not close to the speaker(s). They are also often for things like local government meetings where the speakers are using a lot of proper nouns that you may not be familiar with. Both of these factors result in a LOT of rewinding to listen to a word multiple times.
anamexis 11y ago
I did this for awhile, and it takes surprisingly long to do these transcriptions. They are mostly transcribing accident interviews for insurance companies. The recordings are absolutely terrible, so you have to re-listen to each part many times to get it right. Additionally, since it is paralegal work, there are very strict requirements for formatting and accuracy. 30 minutes spent transcribing a 4 minute audio clip would not be unusual.
- 11y ago

amelius 11y ago

I guess the wages are low because any task has to be verified by another person (possibly in a consensus-test, where the input of the other person is verified against your input). Or at least, that's what I'm guessing.

AJ007 11y ago
It has been years, but when I placed projects on mturk I had them listed to be completed 2-3 times each. This was the only sane way to filter out input by users which was completely wrong. The positive thing was once you identified someone submitting non-sense you ban them from the project and pay nothing. Americans are not ready for what is going to happen to the labor market when minimum wage goes to $15 an hour.
- eru 11y ago
  > Americans are not ready for what is going to happen to the labor market when minimum wage goes to $15 an hour. Lots of `informal' employment, I'd guess?
zappo2938 11y ago
Duolingo has hundreds of people translating the New York Times into several languages being paid nothing. (edit) What about people who spend hours answering questions on Stack Exchange? American's spend several hours a day watching TV. What if the service gives people a distraction that they are mentally active in? There might be several advantages other than monitory performing these tasks over passively sitting in front of a TV.
- corysama 11y ago
  There was a stat a few years back that if we could redirect 1% of e everyone's time spent watching TV we could have a new Wikipedia-scale project every 7 weeks. Zoning out has its place, but I bet more than a few percent of TV time is raw boredom rather than relaxation.
- xacaxulu 11y ago

cgriswald 11y ago

I'm wondering what percentage of Mechanical Turk workers are doing the work while at their primary job.

Mz 11y ago

I have never gotten into Mechanical Turk, but I do freelance work online. My "hourly wage" depends in part on how together I am. I am medically handicapped. Some days, I am fairly together and can make around $12/hour -- not dissimilar form what I was making at a corporate job after a few pay raises. On a so-so day, it can take me forever to complete tasks, lowering my "hourly wage." However, I still need the money, even if the hourly wage is not great. (Edit: On a bad day, I typically do not work. And I don't get fired for missing a lot of days. This was a constant worry at my corporate job.) Do I wish I earned more per hour? Sure. But I worry about people who want to "improve" conditions for people choosing to do this kind of work. I cannot take a normal job and have any hope of getting well and staying well. I walked away from a corporate job because it was helping to keep me sick. For me, this kind of low wage work buys me precious freedom and control over my life. If you take it from me, I am left with what? Panhandling? Prostitution? ...??? I don't know what I would be left with. But people making $100/hour should butt the hell out with their excessively privileged ideas about "good working conditions" and let people like me have some freedom to choose. It isn't like most people actually give a damn how hard life is for me or others like me.

Frondo 11y ago
Would you complain if, through legislation, nothing were different about your work structure, but you were in fact paid more? I.e. nothing changes but you're making $15/hour instead of $12/hour?
- Mz 11y ago
  There is no way "nothing else" would change. And your comment is rife with assumptions that I find galling. But I don't have time at the moment to address that.
  - eru 11y ago
    Actually, there's one way to make such a change: pay everyone an unconditional basic income of, say, 24$ (= 3$ * 8h) per day. But I agree, Frondo's comment seems to be rife with assumptions.

kruhft 11y ago

A while back I was using Mechanical Turk as a source for programming problems. The major issue was that they were distributing a lot of the work to get around things like the limit of google searches one can do a day (100 I think), so once the problems were scripted, you could easily break those barriers. Certain problems were quite interesting, involving OCR and fuzzy pattern matching on google rankings, and I'm sure certain ones would make good research problems. It was fun for a few days, but even when scripted the amounts you would make were minuscule.

bandrami 11y ago

Hasn't mturk in the years since this article was written essentially frozen non-US workers out of the system?

zo1 11y ago
Non-us requesters, even. I just got this from their site after wanting to setup an account: """ Why is the country set as United States? At this time Mechanical Turk does not support Requesters from countries outside the United States. """

sparkzilla 11y ago

I run a crowdsourced content site that is a kind of Wikipedia for news (see my profile for link). When we first started we wanted to attract Wikipedia writers, who write for free. Those writers are mainly young, white Americans, like the Mechanical Turk writers mentioned in the article. But they wouldn't come over, because they like fighting on Wikipedia for free. So I offered $1 per post to write 50-100 words summaries of the news. Depending on the content a writer could add four to eight posts an hour, getting faster at it as they improved their skills. We had about 50 writers on the program, but could easily have had many more. We were overwhelmed with people wanting to join the program and had over 1000 people on our waiting list. At first, But the $1-per-post program attracted a whole different community: mainly women, many of them minorities, who like to work-at-home. We actually saw this as a big plus because they were no-nonsense about doing the work, and gave diversity to the content, something Wikipedia struggles with. We paid out in Paypal and some people would literally do some work so they could get some food for that day. I think too many companies think of crowdsourcing as a way to get cheap work, but it's really good to get diverse workers. After paying out $20,000 for 20,000 posts we changed to a revenue-share system, where writers earn more as the site grows. That presents a different challenge: finding writers who will put in work now, with the hope of a bigger payout later.

ma2rten 11y ago
How did you recruit those people?
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  There's a large-work-at-home community on the web, with sites that list sites, as well as forums and review sites. Search under "work at home". We also got good word-of-mouth because the pay was reasonable, and the payouts were fast, although you continuously have to reassure people that it's not a scam :-(
  - zo1 11y ago
    >"although you continuously have to reassure people that it's not a scam :-(" It's unfortunate, but that is the nature of the broad term "work from home", especially on the internet. I think tech-savvy individuals have, in parallel, been constantly telling individuals that such keywords are usually scams.

ebt 11y ago

This article is from 2013, not reflected in the HN title. I seriously doubt the following statement in the article is still true: "The users of Mechanical Turk are still early adopters, which explains why so many workers are closer to the median US household income of around $50,000 than to the poverty line." I did some survey work on MT back then, it was fun for a few days, then became incredibly mind numbing. A more recent article on MT (probably posted already to HN): http://www.npr.org/2015/05/22/408680035/mechanical-turk-workers-secret-cogs-in-the-internet-marketplace http://www.npr.org/2015/05/22/408680035/mechanical-turk-work...