In the interest of raising the bar, I have begun sending notes of thanks to those requesters whose rate of pay is fair and generous; even though I have never worked for most of them. I think they deserve to be acknowledged. Especially when there are so many unethical requesters lurking around, taking advantage of our desperation. Just to be clear, by "fair" and "generous," I mean that the requestoer pays AT LEAST .01 PER WORD, for articles and article rewrites. Anything less than this is neither fair, nor generous whether the work is easy or not. Writing is an art. Not everyone can do it well, or even at all, so those with the ability should be compensated accordingly.
shego i think that's a great idea, and your fairness rate seems about right and it's a quick formula for deciding if a task is worth your time. i loved your comment in another post about requesters who make you jump through so many hoops that not even JC himself could manage it - i skip those too, because it seems like they are setting you up to fail. lately i've been trying a few bigger paying hits, and trying to keep track of which ones reject and why. i try not to think too much about what they want these articles for, but i figure one day the internet will be completely filled with content generated by turkers.
When that day comes, hopefully we will all be getting paid what our time and talents are worth. Pros make huge money writing articles, but for all intents and purposes, the rates I quoted are fair for the current mturk market place I too, will not take on work that is labor and time intensive. My personal rule of thumb for tasks that do not require actual writing is this: I need to be making a minimum of .03 PER MINUTE or more. Preferably more...much more.... I can live with 3 cents a minute. Less than that isn't worth the backache I'll get from sitting at my computer all day!
Your rate of $1/100 words is the base rate. If people wish to get quality material they should be ready to pay more than the minimum rate. I work for some freelancers and though their minimum rate is $1/100 words, they pay me way above this rate depending on the quality of my work.
You are right, sonica. That is the base rate; but it's the highest rate I've seen regularly. I don't think, at least for now, on mturk we can expect requestors to pay more than that until we can get ALL of them to use that rate as a starting point. Technically, a 300 word article is worth at least $300-$500; but nobody will pay that here. I guess my point is that we need to get the requestors who want to pay 0.15 for a 100 word paragraph/article to pay at least 1.00; and then we can think about increasing the base rates after we get the lowballers up to speed.
I have stopped working for those people who pay $1/300 or 500 word articles. I prefer to visit this forum and chat or catch up on my reading instead of working for peanuts.
I agree completely. I never worked for that rate doing any writing. It takes too long and they expect way too much for what they pay.
Are you planning to send negative feedback to those who pay less than the base rate. Don't you think they deserve a jolt, and should be appraised of the situation? Thanks to this forum, I no longer work for those who pay less.
i definitely think these requester's feet should be held to the fire, but with amazon holding us hostage by their power to ban, i'd proceed with caution in terms of complaining, even though they deserve it. but i think as long as you make it constructive criticism, and maybe keep a record of it in case you ever need to defend yourself to amazon, it's worth a shot. actually, if the requesters saw complaints from the workers they depend on, it might mean something to them. i actually did write to the article requester who was only allowing 30 minutes to submit 300 word articles and guess what? they wrote back saying they didn't know that once you hit 'accept' the timer starts and you have a deadline... so we'll see if they change it (i suggested they offer about 2 hours, figuring some requesters offer that amount of time to write a sentence - tee hee!)
I have started giving suggestions to reqs who are my favorites, and who bother to communicate with me. Let us see if my efforts get some positive results. I totally agree with Mischa, be cautious, because they can ban you and suspend your account.
I find it kind of interesting that Todd Dickerson allows you 60 minutes to rewrite ONE SENTENCE for .04 cents and also gives you the same 60 minutes to go to a link, read a story and write a whole 200-300 word article for $1.40. His sentence rewrites go pretty quickly, but I don't see a lot of people clamoring to do his articles. If he gave more time for them, I think he'd find more takers, even at $1.40.
The problem lies more with his approval policy. He approves most of the sentence hits, but there is a high rejection rate with his article hits. Who wants to spoil their stats by getting rejected on a $1.40 hit? If reqs want originality, they should allow time for - thinking, framing an article and finally proof reading it. At times, I have had to submit an unchecked article as the hit is about to expire. It is really frustrating.
Yes I have been contacting bad requestors whose pay is insulting--and I tell them in a very diplomatic way that they need to raise it if they want quality work. Yes I have been keeping track of them all, the good, the bad and the ugly! I doubt they will ban us for stating the obvious as long as we do so in a respectful tone. We have to get out of that mentality that the requestor has all the power. Actually WE have all the power, we just haven't been using it. As soon as we all band together and stop accepting low paying hits, they will have to pay more to get the work done. As long as someone is willing to do it for a penny, why should they pay more? I'm worth more than a penny, aren't you? How we value ourselves as workers determines how the requester values us. If we're not part of the solution, we're part of the problem! We must stop accepting low paying hits and we must stand up for ourselves when we have been treated unfairly. We have to take responsibility for the way things are, because essentially, we're the ones who have allowed it to get this way.
I have done several articles for him. I like the fact that the time is limited as it means you can't waste too much time on them, you have to be fairly quick. Anyway, $1.40 an hour is hardly a great rate. I have been trying to really speed up and can now do a 300 word article that gets approved including research in about 30 minutes. Like Shego though I think $0.01 a word is the lowest "fair" rate.
It is the lowest fair rate, and Todd isn't even paying that. It would be in everybody's best interst to stop working for such a demeaning rate. It's not the point that it can be done in an hour; but the point that he would have to pay a normal freelancer several hundred dollars if he hired them outside of mturk to do the assignment. The LEAST he can do is pay the lowest "fair" rate because, as has been discussed before, the man has never even given any of the bonuses he has been promising since he became a requester.
Rates - Time - Speed I'm a good writer, just not a quick writer. And since I don't want to submit crap, I'm not going to accept a hit that doesn't give me enough time to think an article through carefully. I've read some exceedingly awful stuff online and now I know where it probably came from ..... LOL I've only been doing this for a short time, so I don't have all the requesters/characters straight yet. I need to start a little spreadsheet so I can remember which hits I enjoyed and paid OK for the amount of time it took. I have a 99.6 approval rate, so I'm pleased that most of my stuff is getting accepted. I haven't taken any big chances, yet. (Although I got a couple of haughty e-mails from a few requesters saying they were paying me, even though there was som "problem" with my submission.)
SuzyQ, keep a list of those who give you a headache. You will not be able to access your data beyond 45 days. I am regretting as I did not keep a record of my bad experiences.