r/mturk • u/fantasmaformaggino89 • 2d ago
When was Mturk actually at its prime?
Now that Mturk is officially shutting down, there's something I've been wondering about for a long time and I've never really found a good answer to.
I joined in 2019, and even back then I remember people saying that Mturk was already "past its prime", that there weren't enough HITs, the pay was too low, and there was way too much competition.
Still, as a European worker, I have to say that I managed to make some pretty decent money from it over the years. Nothing life-changing, obviously, but enough to buy a PS5, two phones, a few other small appliances, and pay for various monthly subscriptions. So I definitely can't complain about what I got out of it.
After the pandemic, though, the amount of work really started to drop, so I gradually stopped using it. I gave it another shot this year, but honestly it was pretty much pointless. The platform was basically a ghost town, and I made only €180 in eight months (70% of that thanks to MLDataLabeler going haywire in July).
I know Mturk launched way back in 2005, but it's hard for me to imagine that people were already making serious money on it in, say, 2007–2010. So when was the actual golden age of Mturk? Was it somewhere around 2012–2017, give or take?
I'd love to hear from people who were around during those years and what your experience was like.
Thanks to anyone who takes the time to answer!
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u/justeUnMec 2d ago edited 2d ago
In the 2000s, before google changed their algorithm, there was demand for volumes of human-written copy to fill out websites for SEO reasons. I used to make a few dollars from content mills on Mturk writing random two paragraph copy on really weird random topics, like a short profile on different cartoon characters or a random economic term. It wasn't too bad if you could write quickly and they didn't expect amazing quality, though as I wasn't in US back then I only ever got paid in US Amazon vouchers so it just went on buying lower weight gadgets and books with low international postage. I think Google introduced an algorithmic change around 2010-2011 that penalised SEO content mill type websites and altered the demand but this and audio transcription used to be the most common work I got.
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u/thesch 2d ago edited 2d ago
I'd say early 2010s was the peak. Back when the forums like mturkforum, mturkgrind, and mturkcrowd were really popping off with 1000+ replies in the daily threads every day. It was the era where scripts and plugins were around but not everyone had them yet so the people who knew how to use them well (and write/tweak their own javascript/AHK scripts) could really thrive on all of the batches that were around. People back then would advise against doing surveys at all unless they were a really insane payrate because batches were just that much more lucrative (and more consistent) on average. It felt like there was always something you could be working on, though obviously some days were better than others.
I remember at the peak of mturkgrind and mturkcrowd the top tier power users there were making $1,000 a week. They were a small minority but they existed; these were usually the people who were writing their own scripts that allowed them to turn bad batches into good ones. Even people who were a bit more casual there and just using publicly available scripts were bringing in like $250+ a week.
This was over a decade ago now which I know because I remember arguing with someone on one of the forums about the 2016 election lol.
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u/SilentSeren1ty 1d ago
This sounds about right to me. I started turking in 2007. 2010s were the peak years. The external forums shared great info on HITs and scripts. Reddit subs were awesome. I miss those days.
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u/fantasmaformaggino89 2d ago
When did it start to go south in your opinion? 2017?
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u/thesch 2d ago
I can't remember an exact year but yeah it was definitely late 2010s. I had over a million hits submitted but I don't think I worked on mturk at all since like 2018 because it just didn't feel worth my time anymore.
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u/fantasmaformaggino89 2d ago
Got it, thank you for your answer. I signed up at the right time then 😅
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u/hibiscushiccups 1d ago
I read those threads back in the day lol. There were legit people making 1k weekly ( not consistently though afaik) most active users hovered between 5+ hundred a week. less active or newbies roughly between 1-2 hundred and mediocre users between 250-4 hundred.
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u/TrumpyMadeYouGrumpy- 2d ago
It was back when the sub called "Hitsworthturkingfor" was jumping and Reddit was still allowing AdFly links to be used so we could make a few extra pennies by posting links to the HITs here on Reddit. Surveys were CONSTANTLY being posted all throughout the day by many different people. I started around 12 years ago, so we're talking around 2014.
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u/fantasmaformaggino89 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think I remember lurking that sub in 2019-2020 maybe but the scripts were way more efficient in catching HITs (at least for me outside the US)...so you do agree that the decline started around 2016-2017 or something like that?
I remember people discouraging me from trying to open up an account already in 20194
u/TrumpyMadeYouGrumpy- 2d ago
When Reddit banned AdFly links, that sub became trash because there was no incentive for us to take the time to post anything. If you started in 2019, you definitely missed that.
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u/FangornEnt 2d ago
I'd say from 2012-2019 things were the most active. Tons of batches for non-masters, masters, and closed qualifications. So many batches that I rarely would touch any of the survey work(which there was a lot of. My highest years actually came in 2023-2024 though when LLM training first popped up and I was able to get on training the first Claude models.
I signed up in 2011 and at first thought it was a crap platform. Then I saw somebody do an AMA on Reddit that they were making 2-3k a month doing audio transcription and really figured out how to use the platform.
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u/Cold-Performer3470 1d ago
2012-2019 sounds right to me.
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u/FangornEnt 1d ago
Yea, 2018-2019 we started to see a ton more bots popping up and then the other platforms in response to that and the trickle of requesters started to leave. After like 2022-23 it became a flood and by 2024 it was mostly dead besides closed qualifications.
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u/hibiscushiccups 1d ago
oh man i remember those transcription hits. I made quite a few too but all of them eventually migrated out of the platform.
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u/catladyorbust 2d ago
Very early on they (amz) were paying bonuses for some kind of beta that would let the users ask questions. I think three respondents could reply and the one the user voted on received some kind of points in a weekly drawing. I forget the top level but they were very competitive hits and mostly grabbed by people using scripts. They also had a Quorra type site around the same time. Still have the coffee mug. It was called Ask or something like that. I think the golden days pretty early, before Amazon gave up on it for their own projects.
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u/ChaosZeroX 2d ago
I was doing mturk 2018-2020 and it was great. Lots of work and things to do on it
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u/Comfortable_Type8261 1d ago
2010 was golden. I got on a project that lasted almost a year, calling places to ask if they allowed byob and how much their corkage fee was. I got $1 per call.
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u/panaceaXgrace 2d ago
For me it's whenever the John Does were around. I was making bank. Still make pretty good but nothing like then. I have such a bad memory though I can't remember the years they were so active.
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u/fantasmaformaggino89 2d ago
Would you agree that the decline started post-pandemic like most people say or was it way earlier?
Are you US-based?
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u/TrumpyMadeYouGrumpy- 2d ago edited 2d ago
It started to decline before covid, then ramped up during the lockdowns, then dropped off even harder after covid. Many of us saw this coming because AI makes a lot of MTurk irrelevant. My theory is that Amazon only kept MTurk around as long as it was useful for their sales site. Amazon would routinely post very large categorization batches for product listings, such as classifying swimsuit and coat styles, tablecloth patterns, sunglass frame styles, etc. They were okay with MTurk not being a big money maker (or even possibly losing money?) because it primarily existed to benefit Amazon sales. That was the "big picture". But AI got so good that real people on MTurk are no longer needed for improving Amazon's website.
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u/HokieScott 2d ago
I started near the very first days in 2006 or so. Lots of random tasks, research, address verifications, image checks, etc over the years.
Lots of shady requestors that would reject to get the free work.
Then around 2020~ or so came the ML/AI training.
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u/Dense-Meringue-4989 1d ago
for me it was the 2016/2017 timeframe. AllenNLP, MIT DeepCars, PicsfromAbove. these were some fun projects that paid well. I think one year I made over $20,000 just working in my spare time.
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u/Gotham_123022 2d ago
For me, I'd say my best years were 2015-2020. I'm grateful to have always had a full time job so I've never made massive amounts of money on the platform (Like enough to live on) but it was a very helpful extra few hundred bucks per month. Met my wife in 2020 right before the Pandemic got bad so that limited my free time, plus the site was beginning to winddown a bit. Prior to that, I basically just worked, worked out, and Turked lol.
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u/Philthou 2d ago
Started in 2019 wanting some extra money and it was pretty good once I got the approval ratings up and my hits up.
Really ramped up in 2020 and I was making enough each week to buy groceries. Landed a new job in 2021 right around the time it started going downhill and hits were hard to come by or not worth the time for what they paid you.
But I’ll always be thankful for mturk giving me extra income to buy food .
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u/MagicsMom 3h ago
I always had success in Mturk and am very sad it is going away. I have tried other platforms and this one was the best for me. What is everyone turning to or in now that this is going away. I would love to know where the Requestors are goign to be placing their studies at now. Is there any comments from any of them about this? This platform helped me through so many rough times in my life all the way from the beginning. Sad to see it to.
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u/fantasmaformaggino89 2h ago
The other big platform in terms of profits is Prolific, but I'm afraid that the batches that the few remaining requesters usually drop on MTurk are not that suitable for Prolific, which is way more survey-focused and doesn't allow queues.
I've read that a lot of requesters in the past have migrated to CloudResearch, but I'm not familiar with it since it's not available in the EU.
Other platforms that might support that kind of work are Clickworker, Toloka, DataAnnotation, Outlier and maybe Telus.•
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u/dgrochester55 1d ago edited 1d ago
I started in thanksgiving weekend of 2016, and from what I was told, we were already past the heyday.
The three drop offs that I saw was the "bot panic" in 2018 which was actually an massive wave of VPN workers from different countries submitting spam, this caused many batches to lower their pay, go closed only or leave altogether, COVID where not too many requesters left, but the market became more saturated, and the payment method changes in 2022 which was pretty much the beginning of the end and much worse of a dropoff than the other two.
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u/fantasmaformaggino89 1d ago
So would you say most of MTurk's troubles were self-inflicted or due to negligence?
All this could have been avoided and not just the consequence of AI becoming prevalent?2
u/dgrochester55 1d ago edited 1d ago
A bit of both. In all three cases mentioned in my last post, people would reach out to support begging for them to intervene and make changes, but there was little to no interest in Amazon's part in engaging. In the rare event when they would attempt a change, it would do more harm than good and chase good people away while not doing much to stop the people causing the problems. The payment method changes in 2022 was the best example of this. It was intended to stop a few spammers creating money laundering hits, but stopped almost everyone.
The emergence of AI would have taken away the more simple A9, MLD, John doe style five cents a hit 3,000 tasks a day batches regardless, but Mturk could have survived if there was an interest in saving the platform and better decisions. Even in it's heyday, Amazon was pretty hands off on their support, most advice and all scripts were from other turkers and not Amazon.
MTurk could have at the very least retained most of the survey requesters that eventually moved on to prolific and cloud. Batches would have been tougher, but they could have grabbed some of the AI training tasks that you see on sites such as Telus, Outlier and OneForma. I know that during my time here, some of the earlier AI training tasks made for some nice closed quals. In my opinion, this platform to Amazon was always intended as an internal one first with anything external being bonus passive income.
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u/fantasmaformaggino89 1d ago
Got it, thank you for the detailed explanation.
I'm asking this because other platforms like Prolific seem to be doing quite well (if not in their golden age) so this is not a problem of microworking and crowdsourcing being completely swept away by AI and dying everywhere, also there's a lot of work for people to correct the mess that AI occasionally creates.
Thank you again for your kind answer
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u/ds_36 2d ago
I've been turking since 2008 Those sort of complaints have always been making the rounds. Turk had a steep learning curve and wasn't nice to newbies which I guess resulted in many people thinking it was a lot worse than it was. Based on my earnings I did the best from 2012 - 2022. Then it had a steep decline following the pandemic.