Decreasing Mturk earnings - The reasons behind!
By faithshore, 12th Jan 2012 | Follow this author
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Posted in WikinutMoneyMaking Money
Amazon Mechanical Turk or Mturk payments are decreasing day by day; and certain Mturk users are facing serious problems because of this. But what are the actual reasons for decreasing Mturk earnings? An insight into the real reasons that compelled Mturk earnings to decrease.
Amazon Mechanical Turk or Mturk earnings decreasing day by day - The reasons!
Amazon Mechanical Turk or shortly 'Mturk' is a website where internet users referred to as 'Worker's can do simple jobs and earn money. Jobs can be anything from liking a picture on facebook to writing an article of 500 words. Jobs can also be submitted on the website as a 'Requester' so that others can do them for a payment. However, to be a requester, a person must be an US citizen.
At the beginning of the website a few years ago, workers were paid a significant amount of money for each completed job. Although it was less than minimum hourly wage in most cases, still it was good. But as time passed, the payment reduced continuously and now the payments are extremely less; ranging from $.01 - $.10 in most cases to $1 or little more in rare cases. But what are the reasons that led to this significant decrease in payment? The reasons for decreasing Mturk earnings have been listed here.
1. Increasing number of users:
When the website started, the number of Mturk users was less since it was not very well-known. Therefore, a lot of Workers were not available to do a particular job. So Amazon had to pay better in order to get the jobs done. But now, since the website has grown tremendously and there are really large number of available workers, hence, the works are done even if the payments are near to nothing.
2. Added pressure of international users:
As the site is getting bigger and bigger and the number of workers and 'requester's are increasing along with the amount of available works; a significant aspect to notice is the increasing number of international workers. Since the number of international users has increased to a large extent, the workers are willing to do a job for extremely low amount of money, hence causing a decrease in Mturk earnings. The main reason is the vast difference of living standards of the developed countries and the developing or under-developed countries. Earning a dollar or so per day may mean nothing at all to a person living in the US or some other developed country, but for someone living in a really poor country, $30 a month might be enough to make their survival a lot easier, or at least to certain extent.
3. Global economic conditions:
At present, the economies of most of the countries are not up-to the mark as it used to be before. Since the 'requester's are US citizens and a similar economic situation is going on in the US, the decreasing amount of payment per job is no surprise. Also, the 'requester's as well as Amazon now know the limits i.e. they have understood that even if they put an extremely less amount against a job, there will be hundreds of willing workers to do that job, if not thousands. Therefore, this is another reason for decreasing Mturk earnings.
Amazon Mechanical Turk or Mturk, once referred to as a mean of making some extra pocket money has now become a mean of survival for the poor - an exchange of time and effort for almost nothing. But still, for someone who has nothing, it is more than a blessing!
Comments
16th Jan 2012 (#)
First off, great article! Mturk is not a site I have used although I have certainly perused it. I'm not suprised this happenned but thankfully there are others.
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16th Jan 2012 (#)
@melissa: thanks!
@prakash: yes, i do use triond. besides, this article was for information's sake, not a personal statement or about something related to myself. thanks anyways for commenting.
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28th Jan 2012 (#)
An excellent write up thanks for the interesting info...
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