When I started Turking, I started working with a requester. The job was a 5-cent photo tagging job. After working my way through a couple of batches, I received a *very* complimentary e-mail about the quality of my work. I was also being offered a bonus as an incentive to keep me working for them. Who turns down a bonus? Not me. Well, the bonus was 15 cents. Now, I was not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth, but a 15 cent bonus on several dollars worth of work isn't exactly (for me) loyalty-inducing. I'll keep doing the HITS, sure, but if something better comes along, I will do those first. So, I wrote back to them. This particular requester is very interested in finding loyal, quality workers. They had been tossing around some loyalty incentives for their good workers for a while, and I kept up an e-mail correspondence with them about things that would work for me as an individual, and my best guess for other workers. This is how a 5-cent HIT turned into a 10-cent HIT with auto-approve. After communicating with them about an issue in the bonus system, there came a large lump bonus as well as a bump in each HIT payment. Moral of the story? Keep in contact with your requesters!
Yes, I agree with this post completely. You should always be professional and polite in your correspondence with requesters. Being helpful doesn't hurt either. There have been requesters that give you a bonus when you tell them if their hit is broken or if there's some other issue with it. Building an honest relationship with requesters is really the only way you'll make a living on Mturk. Along with doing high quality honest work, of course.
I usually do surveys so there's not much repeat business there. But today I decided to revisit transcription. So I took a HIT by SpeechInk which I'm qualified at 87. The HIT (again!!) was barely understandable. Bunch of druggies talking about stuff that very few (unless you're one of them) can understand. Well, a 4min 10 sec HIT took me 1 1/2 hours to transcribe properly (I am a perfectionist). I had to slow down, rewind, speed up, rewind, rewind, slow down, etc. to understand what the hell they were saying to do the transcription (I type fast btw). And even then it wasn't 100% !!! Like, obviously they would use software to transcribe if it was so clear, right? Anyways, it was so frustrating and oh (1.25 and bonus of .65 to make $1.85 and I didn't get the full bonus last time). I wrote to them that I would like to be compensated the equivalent of $8 per hour (hey, no health care, no bathroom breaks, should be worth it, right?). We'll see what happens. But my guess after looking at their website for what they charge customers equals sorry, we only take real desperate people / slave laborers.