12/01/2006

Mechanical Turk Workers Mostly US-Based

I've got some results to share from a questionaire deployed on Mechanical Turk to gather stats and feedback from the Turk workforce.

Here's a taste of the info gathered from the first 100 responses: a breakdown of country of origin. As suspected, Amazon's U.S.-centric payment system has resulted in a mostly-U.S. workforce, but a few workers from elsewhere are participating.

I also see this same geographic spread in the web stats for this blog:
  • 79% United States
  • 4% Canada
  • 2% UK
  • 2% Israel
  • 2% France
  • 1% each from Cyprus, Finland, Germany,
    India, Italy, Malta, Netherlands, Romania,
    Singapore, Thailand, and (yes!) Turkey.
I'll leave you with one comment from Finland-based worker that sums-up the payment issue nicely:
The idea is very intriguing, but unfortunately U.S. businesses aren't taking advantage of it and the service isn't open to bold people elsewhere.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm slightly surprised by the lack of Australians, but given there's no amazon.com.au and shipping from the US is pricey I can see why.

pilgrimchick said...

Yes, shipping from here is very pricey, although lately there has been some discussion about amending that--among other things--given the dollar has been rather weak and it doesn't seem like that is going to change quickly.

Bofia said...

I was expecting more than 4% from UK

Anonymous said...

The reason there aren't more workers in the UK and elswhere is because MTurk pays in Amazon.com credit. You can't transfer the credit to Amazon.co.uk, and you can only bank the money if you have a US account.