Dallas, Texas 06/24/2015 (Financialstrend) – University Researchers were dealt a major blow after Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) initiated new fees for its online labor service, Mechanical Turk. The e-commerce giant has now doubled the fee it collects from requester who usually seek laborers to perform various tasks online.
Mechanical Turk has been around for about ten years having grown in popularity as the go-to place for crowd sourcing or for divvying tasks into smaller pieces for distribution.
Mechanical Turk New Rates
As part of the new changes, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is to charge a 20% commission up from 10% it used to charge for each task. Requesters in need of more than ten people will have to pay an additional 20% commission to use the service. The increment was the subject of an uproar on social media as people took to Twitter with the hashtag ‘maturate’ to complain about the increments
Some of the jobs on the platform include finding images of real estate agents, paying as much as $0.04 per picture or $0.02 for copying text from a business card. Princeton University notes that Mechanical Turk provides a relatively cost effective way of engaging with a set of respondents over a short period of time.
Impact of the Increment
Academic researchers will be the most affected as most of them have in the recent years resorted to Mechanical Turk for completing their studies. Researchers may have to pat ways with more cash to get their assignments done or pay people carrying surveys for them less to stay within their current budgets.
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in a statement affirmed that the new changes will allow it to continue growing Mechanical Turk marketplace while innovating on behalf of users. Amazon could be dealt a major blow with people shifting to other services as most of them have already started calling for the introduction of academic tier or pricing.
