With MTurk and Microworkers effectively competing with each other for the same pool of workers and employers, I thought it might be interesting to compare the two companies from a worker’s perspective, and ask the question: “MTurk or Microworkers, which is best?”
MTurk Advantages
1 Definitely more jobs/hits available on Mturk
2 No minimum earnings level to reach before payments begin.
3 MTurk has more jobs with multiple hits, rather than one offs than Microworkers in my opinon.
4 The Amazon store sells a large variety of products to choose from.
5 Amazon are a large company which are unlikely to fold and they also have a reputation to look after.
6 You can work on Amazon Mechanical Turk for as long as you wish and the pool of hits keeps replenishing itself.
7 There are lots of surveys to do on MTurk and they often pay reasonably well.
8 MTurk is big enough to have its own community, which can be found at the Turker Nation forum, MTurk Forum and the Turkopticon Toolbar feedback.
9 You can occasionally make a reasonable amount of money in one day on MTurk if you find good hits and put some effort in.
Microworkers Advantages
1 The lower number of jobs on Microworkers actually makes the site more manageable and easier to navigate.
2 The look and design of Microworkers is more attractive and functional, methinks.
3 They let you know what percentage of workers were successful previously on a job, which helps you to decide whether to take it or not.
4 Certain jobs like Youtube likes and voting in competitions seem to pay better on Microworkers than on Amazon Turk, that’s my experience anyway.
5 PayPal is good way to be paid with lots of options for spending your money etc.
6 Microworkers is fine for supplementing other income sources and gradually building up some extra money.
Summary
Unfortunately both the Amazon MTurk and Microworkers websites have plenty of scammy, spammy, requesters/employers on them, in my experience. Although this doesn’t stop me working on them, it would be nice to see this sort of thing clamped down on more.
I personally tend to use both MTurk and Microworkers, but in slightly different ways. MTurk I sometimes work on for extended periods, maybe a few hours, especially when there are hits and requesters that I particularly like. Microworkers, on the other hand, I tend to use for maybe 15-30 minutes/day and just do a few tasks, with the intention of making a dollar/day towards the ten dollar payout minimum.
