Bringing Future Innovation to Mechanical Turk writes of "Growing the Value of the Mechanical Turk Marketplace," and you can believe as much of that as you want.
"...we are considering changing our base commission to somewhere between 20% and 35%. Today, our base commission is 10%. We will share the outcome of this analysis in June."
They don't say what they intend with Masters commissions, and (perhaps more important) they don't mention minimum commissions. Currently, any HIT paying less than five cents must still pay a half-penny commission. Publishers of penny HITs already pay commissions of 50%.
Requesters have left AMT before, sometimes taking big books of business. Over a year ago, CrowdFlower-fka-Dolores Labs set up its own shop. CrowdSource has lately moved away from AMT, in favor of a mix of platforms. At the margin, aggressive pricing encourages others to look further afield, too.
They don't say what they intend with Masters commissions, and (perhaps more important) they don't mention minimum commissions. Currently, any HIT paying less than five cents must still pay a half-penny commission. Publishers of penny HITs already pay commissions of 50%.
Requesters have left AMT before, sometimes taking big books of business. Over a year ago, CrowdFlower-fka-Dolores Labs set up its own shop. CrowdSource has lately moved away from AMT, in favor of a mix of platforms. At the margin, aggressive pricing encourages others to look further afield, too.
Given larger margins for AMT, other corporations may launch competing services. Google has twice the market capitalization of Amazon. Microsoft has twice the market cap of Google ... and its cloud operations already compete directly with Amazon Web Services.
I don't see this proposed pricing as clever for Amazon. It would increase revenue, but neither the departure of marginal requesters, nor the loss of psychological goodwill, can enhance AMT's long term value. It's probably significant that Amazon still doesn't propose an honest-to-goodness production version of Mechanical Turk.
If it truly believed it could revitalize AMT, Amazon could increase revenue simply by encouraging the wider use of its ten year-old 'beta test.'
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