Analyzing the Amazon Mechanical Turk Marketplace

Abstract

Since the concept of crowdsourcing is relatively new, many potential participants have questions about the AMT marketplace. For example, a common set of questions that pop up in an 'introduction to crowdsourcing and AMT' session are the following: What type of tasks can be completed in the marketplace? How much does it cost? How fast can I get results back? How big is the AMT marketplace? The answers for these questions remain largely anecdotal and based on personal observations and experiences. To understand better what types of tasks are being completed today using crowdsourcing techniques, we started collecting data about the AMT marketplace. We present a preliminary analysis of the dataset and provide directions for interesting future research.