A Data-Driven Analysis of Workers' Earnings on Amazon Mechanical Turk

arxiv.org

51 points·federicoponzi··10 comments

While $2/hr sounds low for the US, this seems viable in countries with super low cost of living. I suspect language barriers are holding back more people from taking advantage of this opportunity.

Well, the whole notion of $ is sort of tied to a particular living situation, as in: your nationality and exactly where you live, e.g. the US, inflation, etc.

That's to say: you can't extrapolate $2/hr without having extensive knowledge of those countries.

80% of mTurk workers are American, thus the problem. Amazon shut off new signups for international users in 2012, so those who would actually benefit from the platform's lesser pay can't even work there.

That sounds like too much, $2 an hour median is more than a median wage in a ton of medium-developed or even quasi-developed countries (say it is under $3 in Russia and just over $2 in Belarus). Jobs on Mechanical Turk are simple and nearly everyone mentally healthy can do it. I wonder why wasn't rate driven much down by people from very poor 3rd world.

> nearly everyone mentally healthy can do it

Don't forget they need basically unlimited access to a computer and internet connection, too. That'll cut down your eligible worker pool a fair bit.

Also language barriers, and a fair share probably does not even know that such opportunity exists.

Given solid English skills and good internet connectivity, things like Fiverr might be more lucrative.

Data driven analysis.... really????

> We recorded 2,676 workers performing 3.8 million tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk.

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