On Internet Business

Review – the value of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to business

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

Mechanical Turk is a service provided by Amazon, better known for book sales, that allows individuals to complete simple tasks for small payments, or businesses (called requesters) to post low grade work which is then completed swiftly by a range of people.

It’s a dual user website, like elance, where businesses post HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) and individuals apply to complete them. The difference between elance and Mechanical Turk lies in three areas:

1. The payment to service providers
2. The relationship between the requester and the HIT completer
3. The nature of the tasks.

First, the payments – each HIT has a fee, often a really tiny amount, and the business may pay sixty individuals a few cents, rather than one individual the whole amount as they would with elance.

Second, there is no interrelationship between a requester seeking to have HITs completed and the people undertaking them. The whole process is mediated by the Amazon service so you don’t have any real sense of who’s doing your work or why.

Third, the tasks are short-term, repetitive and requiring lower skill levels than elance. If you want several dozen people to test the registration system on a new website, Mechanical Turk is your baby, but if you want detailed feedback on their experiences of the registration process, it’s not.

You can limit the geographic location of the folk who complete your HIT, so for example you can ask only UK workers to review your UK road sign quiz, or only German speakers to read your new German-language website.

Payments are managed by Amazon Mechanical Turk which takes a 10% fee over and above what the requester is going to pay the HIT completers –if a HIT pays $0.20, Amazon Mechanical Turk collects $0.02. The minimum commission charged is $0.005 per HIT.

And that’s one of the biggest problems – you can use the Mechanical Turk, if you’re not a USA based business, but it’s complicated, or as Amazon put it: Requesters must provide a U.S. ACH-enabled bank account and a U.S. billing address in order to submit a request for tasks to be completed through the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site. If a Requester is not a legal entity, but is submitting tasks to Amazon Mechanical Turk as an individual, he or she would also need to provide a U.S. driver’s license number. So if you have an American arm to your business, Turk may be valuable to you, but it’s not truly international for requesters as it is for HIT completers.

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