The results reveal a portrait of Turkers as people who use the site on a frequent basis. At the same time, the money they earn there is often not their primary sources of income, and for many Turkers their reported rate of pay is relatively low. Many of the Turkers who responded to this survey are frequent users of the site.
But although most of these Turkers do work regularly, the amount of time they spend on the site in total each week varies quite a bit. In addition, for many workers the numbers of hours worked varies from week to week.
One of the benefits for Turkers is the flexibility to work when they want to. Activity on the site also varies in intensity throughout the day. An analysis of data from mturk-tracker finds that throughout , the number of HIT groups completed by Turkers is highest at p. That level of activity stays fairly constant until it starts dropping at p. The lowest rate of activity typically occurs from a. EST until a. This pattern suggests the highest rates of activity occur during the afternoon and evening hours on the East Coast.
However, since Mechanical Turk is a service used around the world, the times of day are different for other parts of the U. Mechanical Turk pays its workers by the task completed and not by an hourly rate, meaning it is not required to follow federal wage laws. At the same time, the variable pay means workers can earn money based on their skills and speed, rather than constant wages.
To gain an understanding of the typical income for those working on the site, Pew Research Center asked these Turkers to share the amount of money they typically earn per hour. The majority of Turkers canvassed here use the site to supplement other sources of income. For this group of workers, Mechanical Turk is essentially their full-time job.
Amazon did not reply to a request for comment about this alleged practice. The only other work she was able to find was a hour-a-week minimum-wage job training workers at a factory how to use computers. In the county where Erica lives, only about half of people 16 years or older are employed, compared to 58 percent for the rest of the country.
One-quarter of people there earn below the poverty line. But there are other reasons she makes so little that have to do with the nature of the platform.
The tasks that pay the best and take the least time get snapped up quickly by workers, so Erica must monitor the site closely, waiting to grab them. Requesters use Mechanical Turk because they can farm out menial work on the cheap and get that work done quickly—with hundreds of workers each transcribing one minute of an audio file, for example, a final product can be returned in short order.
Other sites like Crowdspring, which is an online marketplace for graphic design and other creative services, and Snapwire, a photo-crowdsourcing site, allow companies to get creative work done at a low cost. On most of these sites, requesters hold more leverage. Workers can choose to get paid every day, rather than waiting for a paycheck for two weeks. Amazon did not respond to multiple requests for comment about this article.
A research paper published in December that analyzed 3. He says workers spend a lot of time looking for tasks, waiting for the interface to load, and trying to complete poorly explained tasks before deciding to return them.
The paper did not research how many of the people it tracked depended on Mechanical Turk as their sole source of income. However, the size of each group can be inferred from a collection of different data sources. According to Alexa. Of course not all of those visitors participated in the marketplace. Some may have visited to see how the site works. However, the Alexa data give at least circumstantial evidence that many were there to earn money.
The average user visited the site almost eight times each in December and spent more than 33 minutes per day there. During the period Dec. Once a large number these jobs are queued, the experienced Turker maximizes their payout by clearing their queue as fast as possible — possibly explaining why high-paying failed responses tend to come much faster than any other response category.
Newer users are more likely to accept and complete tasks one-at-a-time, finishing them faster within the system, but completing fewer tasks HITs with more care. To this point, a study found that 5. The rewards structures in place on MTurk produce an almost adversarial relationship between requesters and Turkers. This can lead to response quality issues, as one assumes that some accuracy is traded for speed. Requesters, on the other hand, are primarily interested in data quality.
From their perspective, it seems that better quality data can come from posting HITs with reduced rewards so as to target newer or more casual Turkers. With the implicit requirement to spend dozens of hours completing hundreds or thousands of short, low-paying tasks, unethical requesters can easily find a willing audience of Turkers who will complete the task with higher levels of attention than undergraduate students doing psychology studies.
With more workers and researchers turning to the platform to replace lost face-to-face opportunities, we believe it is the ethical duty of Amazon to reform the incentive structure of Mechanical Turk and put a stop to this vicious circle.
Furthermore, requesters and Turkers should step up to change the perception of MTurk as a place to source low quality labor for exploitative wages.
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