Mechanical Turk is a system for crowdsourcing small tasks. And it rocks, if you don’t like doing small tasks.

Amazon developed the system in 2005 to crowdsource the job of categorizing its own products, mostly CDs. It’s been open for public use (in Beta form) ever since.

I’m writing about it because mTurk has remained impressively unknown over the years, even among techies. But for entrepreneurs trying to build web systems fast (and gain users, content, discussion, etc.), it can be a powerful secret weapon.

The Idea

Mechanical Turk bridges the gap between completely automated tasks (such as counting the words in a book), and creative tasks that require human thought (such as writing the book). The mundane tasks that live in this gap are not quite doable by machines yet. An example is re-writing a book, paragraph-by-paragraph, to retain the original meaning but with a different wording (as with avoiding duplicate content penalization).

How it Works

1. Break your crazy task into many micro-tasks (called “HITs”: Human Intelligence Tasks”).
2. Design your HIT on mTurk: describe what each “Turker” must do, how they submit the answer, and how much you will reward them.
3. Submit your HIT, and wait…
4. When the work is done, approve it so the Turkers get paid.

Read their FAQ to learn the rest.

Who does these tasks?

Turkers seem to come from every country, with most from the US and India. In fact it’s surprising there aren’t more in India considering the state of Elance, ODesk, and other crowdsource-ish markets. The last I checked, Amazon only direct-deposited earnings into bank accounts or paid Turkers in Amazon credits, which would work best for North Americans. In any case, you can specify which countries are eligible to complete your HITs.

How much do I have to pay?

You can set any prize for your HITs but since it’s a free market, you need to set a reasonable price to get any work done. Many HITs are priced at only $0.01 for simple tasks like image tagging, while others are over $5 USD. I try to keep the effective hourly rate for my hits between $8 and $12 per hour.

Example Uses

My first useful task for Mechanical Turk saved me days of work and hundreds of dollars. I had a video aggregation task; I needed metadata and embed codes for one thousand YouTube videos which met certain criteria. I planned to employ some of my friends for this task and pay them very fairly, which would have run a bill of about $500 and taken about a week. Instead, I broke it into 100 HITs of 10 videos each and posted it on mTurk. To my amazement, the next morning (7 hours later) I had one thousand videos indexed as needed for a quarter of the planned cost.

Other great mTurk uses include:

• Tagging content (photos, videos, articles, etc.)
• Rating and sorting content
• Writing comments, making posts
• Writing reviews, answering simple questions
• Surveys
• A/B page testing
• Aggregation (eg. building a directory)
• Research (eg. finding competitors)
• Clicking ads, Digging articles (just kidding! Totally against TOS, but you were thinking it, weren’t you…)

Surveys

My main use of mTurk has been rapid market research in the form of surveys. In five minutes you can make a basic survey using mTurk’s native forms, or you can link to your own survey system (I prefer PHP-based LimeSurvey).

How fast and how much? About $0.03 per survey question equates to a fair wage, and if you need less than 50 responses (such as with a pilot survey) you won’t wait more than half an hour for all your responses. Of course there is some selection bias with these surveys that you’ll have to consider.

And remember, Turkers are customers too! If you are doing a market research survey for your new widget-thing, why not allow the Turkers to opt-into a mailing list so they can hear when you launch? In the last big survey I did, about 20 percent of respondents gave their email for just that purpose, meaning the survey can pay for itself in leads. It worked for Pixlin.

One problem

When I last checked a month ago Mechanical Turk was still not available to Canadians, but I’m sure you’ll find a way around that.