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
Jeff says
Unfortunately, Amazon only allows Americans to hire people through Mechanical Turk.
RKB says
Good find. How about the quality of work? Are there any checks and balances?
Andrew Allemann says
@ 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.
jp says
Turk rocks!