Mechanical Turk Update - Project Completed
Jul 26th, 2008 | By Kevin | Category: Featured Posts, OutsourcingIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed with Feedburner. Thanks for visiting!
The project I submitted up on MTurk.com was completed this morning. Less than 24 hour turn around for transcripts of a 45 minute teleseminar. I am really pleased with the quality of work as well. It needs some clean-up, but it would need that anyway going from a transcript to ebook or web content. The reward I gave to the MTurk worker was $25. I I had the transcripts done locally here the wait would have been 3 - 5 days, and it would have been $45 for the transcription service.
Besides signing up as as a requester, I also signed up as a worker so I could take a better look at the projects on the site. I am amazed some of these people get anything done. The compensation for a lot of the tasks are way low. There are also web design and programming project up there with no direction as far as what is expected so I don’t understand how anyone can bid on them since the requester hasn’t really described their need.
There are few few up there requesting people to create video and linkback or mention their site in the video. This is a great idea, to have some create, edit and submit a video to YouTube linking back to your site. These projects are running about $3 to $10.
There are also some article writing or rewriting project out there for about $3 for 500 word articles. Pretty decent, I was paying $3 for 500 - 700 word articles from a writer in India I picked up on Craigslist.
I am definitely going to continue using Mechanical Turk for my transcription needs. I am going to continue to review the site for other uses as well, and may use it for some crowdsourcing surveys to determine common question for some upcoming niche research. I can also see it being used for product reviews, I did see an example of an adsense/ebay affiliate site thaat used MTurk.com to get reviews for different models of digital cameras to create the content for the site. They were paying something like 5 or 10 cents for a paragraph review. Crazy stuff.
Kevin
Originally from Wisconsin, I moved out to Salt Lake City over ten years ago on a six month software development contract. I now have over 15 years in software development, and was introduced to internet marketing back in 2003. During the wild west days, our business focused on content sites for Adsense revenue. As it became harder and harder to keep up with the search engines, our business has evolved, and forced us to focus on building lists and creating products. We now have a list of about 5000 interested in goal setting, and a small internet marketing list of about 500.