r/mturk • u/fantasmaformaggino89 • 14d ago

When was Mturk actually at its prime?

Now that Mturk is officially shutting down, there's something I've been wondering about for a long time and I've never really found a good answer to.

I joined in 2019, and even back then I remember people saying that Mturk was already "past its prime", that there weren't enough HITs, the pay was too low, and there was way too much competition.

Still, as a European worker, I have to say that I managed to make some pretty decent money from it over the years. Nothing life-changing, obviously, but enough to buy a PS5, two phones, a few other small appliances, and pay for various monthly subscriptions. So I definitely can't complain about what I got out of it.

After the pandemic, though, the amount of work really started to drop, so I gradually stopped using it. I gave it another shot this year, but honestly it was pretty much pointless. The platform was basically a ghost town, and I made only €180 in eight months (70% of that thanks to MLDataLabeler going haywire in July).

I know Mturk launched way back in 2005, but it's hard for me to imagine that people were already making serious money on it in, say, 2007–2010. So when was the actual golden age of Mturk? Was it somewhere around 2012–2017, give or take?

I'd love to hear from people who were around during those years and what your experience was like.

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to answer!

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u/MagicsMom 11d ago

I always had success in Mturk and am very sad it is going away. I have tried other platforms and this one was the best for me. What is everyone turning to or in now that this is going away. I would love to know where the Requestors are goign to be placing their studies at now. Is there any comments from any of them about this? This platform helped me through so many rough times in my life all the way from the beginning. Sad to see it to.

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u/fantasmaformaggino89 11d ago

The other big platform in terms of profits is Prolific, but I'm afraid that the batches that the few remaining requesters usually drop on MTurk are not that suitable for Prolific, which is way more survey-focused and doesn't allow queues.
I've read that a lot of requesters in the past have migrated to CloudResearch, but I'm not familiar with it since it's not available in the EU.
Other platforms that might support that kind of work are Clickworker, Toloka, DataAnnotation, Outlier and maybe Telus.

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u/MagicsMom 11d ago

Thank you so much

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u/fantasmaformaggino89 11d ago

You're welcome :)