New requester--very few workers taking on my task, thought I've done everything right!

[mattirish]

Hi people! I've read lots of posts and am having fun learning about Turking.

I'm a newb. I created my first HIT, titled "Find up to Five Major Brand Names and Subsidiaries of a Publicly-Traded Company."

It's basically as it sounds. I have a list of more than 5000 companies for which I'm trying to attach affiliated brand names and nicknames that people might search for on my site.

I've given an example of what to do and what not to do. I've limited the number of brand/subsidiary entry fields to five so that nobody has to spend too long on any one company. I've done the task myself and it takes less than a minute, maybe a minute max, depending on the company, so $0.15/HIT doesn't seem egregious.

I originally published a test version with less guidance and required that workers be masters; I've now read how dumb requiring masters is, and got rid of that. For this test, I'm only requiring 85% approval rates and 50 completed HITs--basically nothing, and still nobody's bitten! What gives? I added a link that'll take you directly to a Google search for the company, and you can find the information you need right there or, at worst, on the Wikipedia page for the company!

In about a week I only got two workers, one who did two HITs and another who did seven.

To get 5000 answers, I clearly need to fix something major. Any advice?? Thanks for making this forum so helpful!! My requester name is just "Matt."

-Matt from Michigan

[hballarte]

Hi people! I've read lots of posts and am having fun learning about Turking.

I'm a newb. I created my first HIT, titled "Find up to Five Major Brand Names and Subsidiaries of a Publicly-Traded Company."

It's basically as it sounds. I have a list of more than 5000 companies for which I'm trying to attach affiliated brand names and nicknames that people might search for on my site.

I've given an example of what to do and what not to do. I've limited the number of brand/subsidiary entry fields to five so that nobody has to spend too long on any one company. I've done the task myself and it takes less than a minute, maybe a minute max, depending on the company, so $0.15/HIT doesn't seem egregious.

I originally published a test version with less guidance and required that workers be masters; I've now read how dumb requiring masters is, and got rid of that. For this test, I'm only requiring 85% approval rates and 50 completed HITs--basically nothing, and still nobody's bitten! What gives? I added a link that'll take you directly to a Google search for the company, and you can find the information you need right there or, at worst, on the Wikipedia page for the company!

In about a week I only got two workers, one who did two HITs and another who did seven.

To get 5000 answers, I clearly need to fix something major. Any advice?? Thanks for making this forum so helpful!! My requester name is just "Matt."

-Matt from Michigan

Hi Matt!! Let me see if I can find the hits and I will try one out and see if can give some insight back to you

[Rosie The Robot]

Please write to @spamgirl about getting your requester account set up.

[witch1]

I just did one and it took about 1.5 minutes. The pay is okay, but, if you raised it a little bit that would help. Also, I would raise approval to at least 95% so you get good work. Just my humble opinion.

[cnw10]

Hi people! I've read lots of posts and am having fun learning about Turking.

I'm a newb. I created my first HIT, titled "Find up to Five Major Brand Names and Subsidiaries of a Publicly-Traded Company."

It's basically as it sounds. I have a list of more than 5000 companies for which I'm trying to attach affiliated brand names and nicknames that people might search for on my site.

I've given an example of what to do and what not to do. I've limited the number of brand/subsidiary entry fields to five so that nobody has to spend too long on any one company. I've done the task myself and it takes less than a minute, maybe a minute max, depending on the company, so $0.15/HIT doesn't seem egregious.

I originally published a test version with less guidance and required that workers be masters; I've now read how dumb requiring masters is, and got rid of that. For this test, I'm only requiring 85% approval rates and 50 completed HITs--basically nothing, and still nobody's bitten! What gives? I added a link that'll take you directly to a Google search for the company, and you can find the information you need right there or, at worst, on the Wikipedia page for the company!

In about a week I only got two workers, one who did two HITs and another who did seven.

To get 5000 answers, I clearly need to fix something major. Any advice?? Thanks for making this forum so helpful!! My requester name is just "Matt."

-Matt from Michigan

Hi, Matt! Welcome!

One thing I noticed is that you may want to highlight this more in the instructions "Note: some companies don't have any other names or subsidiaries/brands, and that's okay!" Obviously you don't just want people submitting the HIT without searching, but you do want them to know it's ok to go ahead and submit if a company doesn't have other names or subsidiaries so they don't think they have to return the HIT if they can't find anything.

I suspect some of the companies may take people longer than a minute to search for, particularly if they are foreign companies? That may be part of the problem.

[FeistyLady99]

Hi, Matt. I just did 2 of your hits, and of course they were for major corporations (i.e., lots of subsidiaries). The only thing that I would consider any sort of drawback is I was unable to find a list of subsidiaries that wasn't in a "link" format, so that meant I couldn't do a quick copy/paste on the names. I had to pull the tab I searched in over to the side so I could type in the names. Maybe there's a trick I'm not aware of that lets me just copy a link format (like normal text). So, I could see where having to type in names (especially long ones) might be an issue for some turkers who aren't necessarily typists.

Other than that, wasn't too bad.

[alex378]

Did 2 as a test, takes around 2-3 minutes..foreign companies..