Use Amazon Turk to Develop Web Content

Monday, January 19th, 2009

Amazon Mechanical Turk is an affordable way to create content for your web site.

If you’re trying to jumpstart a review web site, moderate a forum, or get the contact information for potential web site advertisers, Amazon Mechanical Turk can help you do it cheap and fast.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Turk has been around for a while, but I finally had a chance to use it today. Amazon Turk is a “marketplace for work”, and enables a community of users to complete tasks for you.

Today I had a list of 340 companies in the Lakeway area that I want to add to my Lakeway directory. But I needed addresses for each company. In less than an hour, the Turk community delivered addresses for all 340 companies at a total cost of $37.40.

Here’s how I used Turk. First, I created a template for Turk users to fill out for each company. Turk provides some samples, and I edited one to fit my needs. Then I decided how much to pay people for each company they completed (10 cents). Next, I saved my spreadsheet of 340 companies as a CSV. After uploading the CSV file to Turk, I verified that everything uploaded correctly. Then I hit the submit button.

Within minutes people started fulfilling my request, company-by-company. As a stats junky, I got a kick out of the Turk data that instantly popped up on my screen:

The screenshot shows how many responses have been submitted, the average time it takes someone to complete the request, and the effective hourly rate I’m paying people for my project ($6.67).

Here are some ways you can use Amazon Turk to help you build and manage web sites:

-Get reviews for your new review web site.

-Review posts on your forum for compliance with terms of service.

-Take a list of fishing companies in Yahoo and get the contact information for each company so you can try to sell them advertising on your fishing web site.

-Jump start a forum by paying people to post in it

-Pay people to submit your web site to various directories

-Analyze a list of domain names in a way that requires human involvement

Further Reading:

  1. Could Amazon or Facebook Challenge Google on Ads?
  2. Amazon.com Mistypes its Own Domain Name
  3. Amazon’s New Products and Its Domain Name Scorecard

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6 Comments » - Posted in Domain Services by

Comments

  1. Jeff
    January 20th, 2009 | 12:57 am

    Unfortunately, Amazon only allows Americans to hire people through Mechanical Turk.

  2. RKB
    January 20th, 2009 | 1:16 am

    Good find. How about the quality of work? Are there any checks and balances?

  3. Andrew Allemann
    January 20th, 2009 | 2:55 am

    @ RKB – You get to accept each “HIT”. In my case a few people said they couldn’t find the address. I searched and couldn’t find them either. One or two people had obviously bad addresses, so I didn’t accept their work.

  4. Domain Name Wire » News » Use Amazon Turk to Develop Web Content … | | Latest domaining news from around the world
    January 20th, 2009 | 6:57 am

    [...] Original post: Domain Name Wire » News » Use Amazon Turk to Develop Web Content … [...]

  5. jp
    January 22nd, 2009 | 11:24 am

    Turk rocks!

  6. Domain Name Wire » News » Inside Demand Media’s Content Machine - The Domain Industry's News Source
    October 29th, 2009 | 8:54 am

    [...] text, film a video, create a headline, copyedit, and fact check. Think of it as Amazon’s mTurk but just for Demand [...]

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