Who Works for Mturk and Why - Part I

When trying to capture the essence of the people who work for Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk), you quickly discover that a lot of different people work for Mturk and for a lot of different reasons. This article will the first in a series of article I present on research looking into the people who work on Mturk and why.

It’s reported that many of the people working for Mturk are from overseas. India and the Philippines are two likely sources for workers for Mturk. The cost of living in those countries are so much lower than in the United States. So much so that some of these workers can make a decent money.

That’s not so true with the U.S. Mturk worker. Of course, that depends on your definition of what “decent money” is. For those out of work and need some income, then just about any source of income is decent.

I’m by no means and expert on this subject and I have only done just a small amount of research on the topic and I really owe much of what I know to others like the people at CrowdFlower.com. They are a labor-on-demand provider and also study entities like Amazon Mechanical Turk.

CrowdFlower conducted a survey and their findings were interesting. Now before I go into that I must say that their survey sampling seemed somewhat low with only 67 respondents.

Now with some of their findings:
> India placed first as to the number of people who work on Mturk at 46%
> U.S. Workers were close at 42%

Another researcher completed his own survey of Mturk workers in early 2010. His findings were similar, but did show some differences and also provided more details.

This second survey showed that U.S. workers dominate Mturk and not workers from India.

> U.S. workers 46%
> India workers 34%

This second survey also showed that in the U.S. females made up the majority of workers in Mturk at over 60%. In India, males made up 70% of the Mturk workforce.

The researcher posits that the reason that females dominate the U.S. Mturk workforce is because most of the U.S. Mturk workers look at Mturk as a supplemental source of income. In many cases, they are stay-at-home moms who can take small amounts of time and devote it to working for Mturk.

Tune in next time when I talk about some more in-depth data on Mturk workers. Maybe you will find yourself in there somewhere.