This is a very vital point for me. Many HITs that pay only $0.01 only are really too low considering the time and skill required for such tasks. Minimum limit that a requester can pay should be bit upper. Mturk will get many more turkers in then.
The problem with that, as I was told by a requester (yes, I emailed them with that complaint) was that they couldn't afford to pay more because of the fees they had to pay Mturk and people were doing the work for .01. So, if people are doing it, the requesters are going to keep their payments low.
The fees are nothing really. The ratio works like this. If my budget is $11 and my projects are $1 each, then $1 per $11 goes to Amazon.
Oh, I wasn't aware that it the way it worked. I agree with this statement though. a penny? Seriously??
for some projects they pay upto 50 cents just to select a radio button. But for some projects they pay only $ 0.01 to read, study and answer more than 5 questions. It depends on the requesters budjet. As long as turkers do the work requesters wont hike the reward amount. Once they dont get their job done then they increase the reward. So dont ever do work for less amount and help other turkers who really need to turk.
I don't mind that there aren't that many Turkers. If there were, nobody would make any money. However, the pay is sometimes insulting and I don't buy the notion that the Requestors can't afford to pay more. If that's the case, they should do it themselves. It's like going out to eat. If I can't afford to leave the server a good tip, I won't eat out!
Also, I recently posted hits that I paid $1.00 each for with a $1.00 bonus and amazon's fee was nominal-- a dollar, I think was all, for ten hits. A bargain in my opinion if you don't want to do the work yourself.
All you have to do, is close off all new people from being able to join. Then all the rates would go up over time, simply because people will wise up. New workers constantly coming in make sure those 500 word articles for $2 get filled.
Those who pay $1-2 for a 500 word article do not have any special requirements, they just want that many words on the given topic. I think that is the reason newcomers prefer to work on them, and the rejection rate is almost nil on them. I have done such hits during my initial few days at MTurk. But once you opt for the $4-5 articles, automatically your work goes through a microscopic review, for spelling, grammar, word count .........etc. So there are many who still opt for $1-2/500 word articles and these articles get approved very quickly.