Amazon’s Mechanical Turk Could Put PayPerPost Out of Business

NOTICE: It has been found (see comments) that creating HITs for advertising purposes is against Mturk’s terms of service.

Amazon Mechanical Turk, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, has the potential to put PayPerPost, a popular paid blog posting website, out of business. It has the power (software), a large company backing, is easy to use, and it is much cheaper.

If you are unfamiliar with Amazon Mechanical Turk, Wikipedia sums the service nicely stating that it is:

a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do.

On the Mechanical Turk homepage, visitors are met with the following graphic further explaining the service:

It is very easy to create HITs and there is plenty of room to accurately describe any paid posting job (review, copy and paste, feedback, etc).

After searching for blog reviews, I could only find one that was looking for reviews of blogs (and not a review of their blog posting on your blog).

$0.25 is extremely low, especially for the required amount of time, but setting a price of $5-$10 (the base price for many paid blog posting sites), could fetch quite a few reviews (and posting on blogs - not just the article sent). However, the above posting gives a great example of how to lay out an advertisement (err, HIT).

Be sure to include your minimum required:

• PageRank
• Technorati ranking
• Alexa ranking
• Number of words
• Links (including anchor text)

It also shows how you can accept or deny blogs when the URL is entered into the text field. That is one of the most lacking features on PayPerPost.

Mechanical Turk is also much cheaper than PayPerPost. JohnChow writes:

The amount that I bid is what the blogger actually makes for writing the post. PayPerPost tacks on another 25% as their commission. The 25% commission is not the only fee PayPerPost gets. There is a $5 opportunity creation fee charged on every new opportunity I create. In addition, there are fees to advertise the opportunity.

If using Mechanical Turk, Amazon.com collects a fee of 10 percent on top of what requesters pay to have tasks completed. For example, if a HIT pays $0.20, Amazon Mechanical Turk collects $0.02. The minimum commission charged is $0.005 per HIT. One great point about Mechanical Turk is the ability of the requester to issue a bonus to a person who completes an HIT. This would give incentive for quality writings, using more links and images, or having large blogs accept the HIT.

However, one of the main reasons Mechanical Turk will not put PayPerPost out of business is traffic. According to Alexa, this blog has a higher reach than Mechanical Turk, and PayPerPost is roughly 9 times higher than this blog.

If Alexa could market the service better by spend some money on advertising, or just create buzz in the blogging community, it might see a huge increase in traffic and HITs for paid blog reviews.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

Technorati Tags: amazon mechanical turk, mturk, payperpost, virtual marketing blog, paid blog postings

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This is not a bad idea at all. Have you tried it yet? I think the advantage to places like PPP are that they are geared towards a specific thing “paid posts” vs. the mechanical turk system which can handle literally everything - which actually makes getting business from certain customers too broad.

Thanks Eric. I haven’t tried it fully yet, but I’m planning to test it out soon and see what kinds of blogs a review is posted on, how well the review was done, etc etc. I agree that mechanical turk is very broad, however it still has the potential to at least stir up the market if enough people hop on board.

Interesting idea, but it is probably not allowed by Mechanical turk. There have been some people who tried similar things recently on Mechancial Turk like paying you to register on other sites, and they get reported and taken down by amazon pretty quick. Your example above is ok because workers are just writing some content right on Mechancial Turk. But you would not be allowed to pay workers to write content on their OWN blogs.

Terry, I havent sorted through the legal documents so I cant confirm, but I did just send an email to see if it was ok. Ill let you know. Thanks for bringing the issue to my attention.

We’ll soon find out…

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/pre.....6YSE1V0X7Z

Unfortunately since I’m in the UK and not in the US I can’t upload any funds as they only accept US bank accounts.

Someone in the US with a bank account could set up a nice business posting HITs for non US people and accepting other forms of payment for a small commission.

It got pulled
————————-
Greetings from Mechanical Turk.

We noticed that you posted Human Intelligence Tasks that violated the
terms of our HIT listing policy. We have removed the HIT(s) from our
web site.

Please be aware that any further violation of our listing policy will
result in the suspension of your account.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

HITId 6WKZW30D2YYZW5XYKW90 - Write a short blog post

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/conditionsofuse

Section 7A: Use of Data and Communications. You may use information
or other data or information acquired from your use of the Site solely
to, and to the extent necessary for you to use the Site, and not for
any other purpose, including but not limited to; for purposes of
solicitation, advertising, marketing, unsolicited e-mail or spamming,
harassment, invasion of privacy, or otherwise objectionable conduct.

Best regards,

RA
Amazon.com Customer Service
http://www.amazon.com
————————-

Amazon pulled the HIT - violation of terms section 7A

Ok. I apologize for a blog post encouraging (unknowingly) things that break Amazons TOS. Im going to put a notice at the top of this page as well as write another post. Thanks.

[...] of being a professional is acknowledging and correcting your mistakes. I had recently posted about using Amazons Mechanical Turk for paid blog posting. Unfortunately this is against Amazon’s terms of service. I would just like to apologize for [...]

You weren’t to know - I read the rules before trying it and it could have gone either way. I requested an honest review, Amazon interpreted this as advertising, this required Amazon to make a judgment as to my motives, was I advertising or simply asking for feedback in a specific form?

Also the wording of Section 7A states information gathered may not be used for advertising or marketing, not that you can’t request advertising or marketing.