Using Amazon MechanicalTurk if location != US?

Question

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a mass-micro outsourcing API, where you can get lots's of small simple tasks (e.g."Is there a shop in this image") done relatively cheaply (e.g. 0.10 U$ per image).

Amazon seems to assume that this service is mostly of interest to US companies. This results in difficulties if you want to use the service (as an "Requester"): for example there is no easy way of funding your Account without an US Bank account.

Can somebody share experiences of using the Service from outside the US?

Answer 1

Since Amazon doesn't let outside US access yet, you'll need to either:

• Wait for Amazon to open it up to outside US, might be a long wait.
• Get a good friend in the US to open a PO Box for you then use an online US bank to create an account. If you don't start a corporation or other legal business, they will need to provide their US drivers license to Amazon too.
• Use a 3rd party provider like HIT-Builder who will let you post on Mechanical Turk using their US Amazon account.

Answer 2

I think they recently changed their rules - I am based in Australia, and as recently as 6 months ago I was unable to use Mechanical Turk. That recently changed and now I am able to post jobs on the service.

Answer 3

You may want to take a look at TurkPrime labs which offers this as a service to non-US based researchers.

Answer 4

The problem you have is that to actually be able to add funds to your account, you need to have a US billing address. If you can get round that issue, then it all works fine.