This is a boring rant due to a terrible experience with a pioneer in the internet marketing industry.
There’s nothing more disappointing than being stuck with a company that doesn’t care because there is not enough other options on the market. Microworkers is a perfect example of this. There is MTurk, but they don’t accept very many types of campaigns and Clickworker costs a $400 setup fee which is an easy way to scare away anyone who is interested in just testing a platform.
Microworkers’ email support is generally quick to response and can be helpful in many situations. However, that’s about the extent of what I can say about them.
- They set a minimum pay for certain types of jobs. Even if it’s a 30 second task, some jobs require high pay just because of the category it falls it. You’re stuck overpaying for tasks. Why not lower the minimum wage and let the market decide what a micro task is worth? If no one wants to do it, the employers will naturally increase their pay.
- They make you purchase at least 30 tasks per campaign. Oh, you only need 10 workers? Too bad. You have to buy 30.
- They don’t accept PayPal, and really don’t care. Even if you’re like myself and tell them you want to make a $1000 deposit to their system for your account, nope, too bad. Credit card or Skrill only. Being a big player has no pull with these guys. They don’t care if you spend $5 or $1000 a month, get in line.
- There’s no real setting to control the speed of completion. Well, they have a speed setting, but get this… The setting ranges from 1 to 1000, and that setting means how many people, out of 1000 Microworkers workers, will see your campaign. This is confusing and entirely useless because you don’t know how many workers will be online that day. So you set 50 as the speed setting. How many thousands of workers will be on, and then, how many will actually opt to complete the task and not just scroll past? This is one of the biggest frustrations I have with them. Why can’t we just set a maximum number of completions per day, because at the end of the day, that’s what we all case about. Not how many people view a campaign. Their programmers were very lazy when it came to this part, and went with the easiest implementation.
- They have 2 types of campaigns and they both have completely different options and features. They will add a new feature to their system, but only add it to 1 of the campaign types, so you’re stuck deciding between the 2, trying to figure out what features you can do without.
- Their API has lots of issues. I implemented their API in a Python project and it took weeks to implement. It honestly felt like I was the first person to use their API. I would code something, and it wouldn’t work right, so I’d email them and they’d email me back a day later after their developers got to fixing the issue. This went on for weeks.
- Their Twitter account is abandoned. It’s always a red flag when a company doesn’t monitor their Twitter. It’s a sign of, “I don’t really care.”
- Their UI is complicated. If you look at the completed campaign below, it says there are 90 completed tasks awaiting a rating. Which hyperlink do you think you click to do the rating? You are probably thinking you click the link beside the “90” and under where it says “not rated” but instead, that doesn’t do anything but show you the number IDs for all the completed tasks. Rather, you have to click the title of the campaign to download the CSV and rate the tasks. Rating tasks is the worst part of the whole platform because of how slow (~3 seconds) each page loads on the platform.
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