Microworkers is now in direct competition with Mturk. Microworker's addition of the Template Test and Verification (TTV) in 2015 provides requesters with the ability to have workers complete complex tasks on the website just as they do on Mturk. In the wake of the Mechanical Turk fee increases of 2015, workers and requesters are increasingly interested in the specifics of Microworkers and other sites like Mturk. Microworkers is open to all countries, but there are some specifics about fees and payouts that workers and requesters need to keep in mind.
OneSpace CEO Stephanie Leffler appears in a December 2015 news interview for Fox 2 News in St. Louis. She briefly discusses the rebranding of the old Crowdsource.com and the future of work. OneSpace is the home of former company Crowdsource since 2015, and it's positioned as a task website similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Workers must complete a few steps before taking tasks, and requesters have interesting options like a free trial and live demo.
If you've been thinking that high-paying surveys like the ones on Mturk aren't available elsewhere, you've got another think coming. Serious academic and science-related surveys post regularly on websites unfamiliar to the average Mturker. Some new sites also post other Mturk-like tasks. Some of these Mturk alternatives might confuse you if you aren't aware of some finer details.
Taskers from India dominate the list of best alternatives to Mturk. Look at the country and traffic statistics on Alexa.com for the most effective sites like Mturk; you're bound to notice that the best sites cater to United States, India and a handful of other countries more than anyone else. Use this data to get an idea of what kind of work load to expect from the top sites.
In the past, Crowdflower monthly fees may have peaked in the neighborhood of $11,000 each month plus a 15 percent fee on the amount paid to workers. A screenshot of Crowdflower's past pricing screen is seen in a requester's write-up on an experience with Crowdflower. If you draw some inferences from information available on the web, you have an assumed estimate of some of the fees charged by Crowdflower and Clickworker.
CrowdSource has announced its intention to launch a worker-requester platform in 2016. In a July 6 CrowdSource feature in Illinois Business Journal, COO Erin Steinbruegge says there's strong demand via a list of clients and freelancers who want to work and interact directly on CrowdSource software.. The nature and timing of the launch are not yet entirely clear.
Start finding out exactly what it's like to use Mturk alternatives while providing little or no information about your organization. Several sites like Mturk allow you to begin typing in a job to try out the process, and some even begin providing you with customized price information. Be sure you know where to go on each website because sometimes these pages are difficult to find.
Take your writing, transcribing, or other specialized task to Microworkers, and they'll enlist help from a group of qualified workers with special skills already proven in similar tasks. Microworkers has a new feature that competitors don't offer; the website recently announced in a blog post that Microworkers is now supplying prescreened specialized worker groups for requesters with specialized jobs. The use of these groups is an option for requesters who don't want to find and qualify workers, but there are a few limitations.
One of Mturk's own requesters now stands slated to serve up some competition as its own seperate site like Mturk. Crowdflower used to be a commonly seen requester on Mturk in 2012 and 2013; the requester took its jobs elsewhere and now serves as its own platform to other requesters. The company must not have had an easy time getting to this point: it has been working through an ongoing dispute in which some former workers claimed they were official employees rather than just online freelancers.
Requesters will soon be able to upgrade to AMT's elite masters qualification workforce for an additional 3.5 to 4.1 percent on their total bill. The overall amount paid will be more with thenew AMT fees scheduled for July 22, but the new lower percentage fee for masters workers makes that workforce less expensive comparatively. It remains to be seen whether this will result in a large shift towards hiring masters workers, or a bolstered reluctance to swallow the extra fee.
Clickworker charges a fee for posting paid tasks, but they won't tell you how much. According to the Clickworker FAQ page, fees are discussed once you make contact with the website. Other sites like Mturk charge a requester as little as 7% on top of the amount paid to the worker, or as much as 45% on top of the amount paid to the worker.
The most prolific workers on Microworkers have earned close to $10,000. Microworkers lets end-users view all workers and sort them by criteria like country, most tasks completed, and the like. Mturk doesn't have this feature. Mturk has its own special features, but the site will begin charging more than twice what Microworkers charges on July 22, 2015. Requesters with 10 tasks will pay a 40% fee to Mturk as compared to the 7.5% out-of-pocket fee at Microworkers.
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