EDIT: Within 48 hours, Amazon pulled down this advertisement.
Yesterday workers were greeted by an annoying new advertisement at the top of all Mturk pages.
The "inquire here" link leads to this PAGE where requesters can promote specific HITs or receive help from the Mechanical Turk team for a price.
Not even 24 hours after this new intrusive advertisement was released on Amazon Mechanical Turk, workers have found many ways to eliminate it from their browsers and will never see the Ad that you are paying good money for. The easiest way to block it is by using a very common browser plugin called Adblock Plus. This simple browser plugin removes this intrusive advertisement from the workers pages.
Workers are very resourceful and come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and less than 12 hours after Amazon unleashed this ad, workers had updated their scripts like Turking Tools to remove this banner from their screens.
We ran 20 HITs to see if it will be an effective way to increase visibility of specific HITs. We asked workers "Have you blocked the new Amazon spam ad yet? yes/NO"
This is the result from 20 workers.
A little over 24 hours after this ad appeared, 15 out of 20 workers have blocked it and will never see it.
Why would workers block something that would help them find work?
The answer is simple, if it is really "work" and pays a fair wage, there is no need to promote it. The work gets completed quickly and promotion is unnecessary.
I have blocked this ad because it takes up valuable real estate on my screen. With the ad (for a HIT that I do not qualify for) I can no longer see all the search results on my screen without scrolling. This wastes my time, which means lost money.
ReplyDeleteWhen a HIT offers fair pay, it is completed very quickly. Workers communicate with one another and that is more valuable than any advertisement. This requester should take the money they spend on advertising and apply it to the reward on their task.
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