So I've only been turking for about 3 weeks and earned close to $400. This is primarily doing transcription after transcription for crowdsurf support. However, while over the past few things they've had over 5000 HITS, now they barely have 2 different HITs with only 100 each. I this normal for requesters or is it time to find something new?
Is there another transcription requester who is as good comparably when it comes to transcriptions? I despise CastingWords and found crowdsurf to be very easy HITS.
They are the only ones I've tried. My understanding is that they are much easier than the others, but might not pay as well.
The situation with CrowdSurf worries me deeply. The timing exactly coincided with end-of-year, the Clairitrans website (CrowdSurf's real name) is just a boilerplate right now. They are my bread-and-butter. Looks like I'm about to take a huge income beating.
I think they might have pulled some tasks from mturk to encourage people to work on their other site, crowd virtualizer. Right now there are around 7000 full text tasks and they want those reviewed and approved over this weekend (they sweetened the pot for full text review offering around $.50/minute compared to the $.25 holiday bonus rate and the $.15 normal rate back when there were hardly any reviews). I saw ten mturk batches a few hours ago and now there are only three so I assume they stopped incoming transcriptions so we can review what's already there (when I was working earlier the number of reviews went from 7500 to 7000 but then back up to 7400, and because their reviews are all segmented they aren't any closer to providing complete captions to their clients). At least I hope that's the case. Crowdsurf is my cash cow. I'm a lil drunk but hope this made sense - I'm hoping to work around 500 minutes of reviews this weekend to get the max bonus (great incentive) so things should be back to normal once their clients are satisfied (they want ALL the review work finished by Sunday at midnight).
They are my cash cow also, and if I could thank your post twice, I would. I learned more from it in 30 seconds that I knew from two months of working with them.
So this may be a stupid question, but how do I access their crowd virtualizer tasks? Is this something that I could be doing as well or do I just need to wait until it overflows to mturk again?
If you've done a fair amount of transcriptions you could try shooting them an email today (support@crowdsurfwork.com) asking for access. Also be sure to request this qualification: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/searchb...transcription+review&minReward=0.00&.x=0&.y=0 They should be monitoring their email and could definitely use more help. Good luck!
Thanks for the info. However, when I clicked on that qualification it says that I can't request it. Do I need to email them to receive the qualification?
You might already have it (check here: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/findquals?requestable=false&earned=true) if not they'll grant it along with access to crowd virtualizer when they review your email.
I actually emailed them the other day and heard back today that I was being promoted to the Crowd Virtualizer but that it could take a week to get me set up. So, I'll be missing this great bonus weekend. Which I am bummed about, but oh well. We emailed a couple more times since I didn't know exactly what the Virtualizer entailed. Since my last email to them I haven't heard back again. Hopefully soon, but might not be until Monday. not sure if they work on Sundays.
I think they're still trying to promote mturk, because their relatively new twitter followed 3 of my accounts over the last week, and their bio plugs an mturk search for them insteas of virtualizer
I signed up for the Crowd Visualizer site and looked at the new crowdsurf website. It seems really unclear how to get qualifications on Crowd Visualizer and begin working on their tasks. Crowdsurf did post some new stuff today, but very minimal and it was gone within an hour or so. I just hope they make the process clear because I can make $30 a day easy with crowdsurf. Without it I struggled to pull in $10 to $15.
I just think they have prioritized the work over on their independent site because they need it done by the end of the weekend. They're paying nearly 4x the rate they usually pay for reviews but they still aren't getting done too quickly. The full-text reviews are actually rather difficult because so much crap makes it through from scammers (it takes me at least 2x the audio length even with scripts) - and honestly I could have made more money doing transcriptions on mturk because of urgent and volume bonuses (the full-text reviews were paying $0.30/min all holiday then they bumped them up to a possible $0.50/min and their mturk hits were pulled). I'm sure there will be thousands of transcription hits back on mturk once this huge queue of reviews is cleared - and hopefully Crowdsurf will weed out some of the scammers.
Can someone post a link to the crowd visualizer site? I found it yesterday but for some reason after 20 minutes of searching can't pull it back up.
https://cielo24.crowdcomputingsystems.com/virtualizer-web Also, from Crowdsurf. Sorry if I confused anyone and hope this eases all worries:
Thanks for the link. Yeah hopefully it's just a dry spell that will flood soon. I signed up for the Crowd Virtualizer, but can't seem to find away to apply/request for any of their qualifications that will allow me to work. Your advice has been awesome thought!
Another issue, In the last few days, they've made it so you can't submit transcriptions(on the actual MTurk website) if any spelling issues are found. Sometimes the spell check just plain doesn't know the word, so even if it's right, it reads as wrong and can't be submitted. Also, it doesn't get computer code. The other day I had to return one because it would not accept some oddly written computer code, even though it was copied exactly as it is in the video. Today I had to return one because it would not accept Ctrl or CTRL for the computer key. I thought this was the way these were supposed to be submitted. I didn't want to lengthen it to Control, since they are talking about the computer key and I didn't want to be rejected over that. I gave them feedback both times. The second time I said that if there is a workaround that I am unaware of, they should probably make this clear from the directions. If there isn't a workaround, they should make one. I had to return both of them and this is frustrating and infuriating.