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Crowdflower Tasks Review: Legit Work at Home Microtasks or Scam?

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WFHR EditorWFHR Editor
10 min read

Last updated: January 31, 2024

Are you looking to make some extra cash while working from the comfort of your home? Have you come across micro-tasking as a way to earn money online? One platform that’s been making waves is Crowdflower Tasks. This platform offers numerous simple tasks you can complete in your spare time for pay, but how true are these assertions?

In this article, we will dive deep into Crowdflower Tasks, exploring its legitimacy, its potential pitfalls, and whether it’s indeed a great opportunity or just another internet scam. Sit tight and get ready to discover if this could be your golden ticket to freelance success or just another disappointment.

Based on our research and user reviews, opinions on Crowdflower tasks are mixed. Some users have found the tasks worthwhile, while others have expressed dissatisfaction with poor pay and difficulty with the tasks. It is important for individuals to carefully consider their skills and preferences before deciding to participate in Crowdflower tasks.

Overview of Crowdflower

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Crowdflower, now known as Figure Eight after a merger, is a platform that provides businesses and organizations with access to human intelligence through different micro-tasks. The company’s goal is to help enhance machine learning by ensuring that data is correctly annotated and labeled. It works with various companies worldwide to scale up their data collection efforts. As such, Crowdflower tasks are a way for people to earn money online while helping organizations describe and classify content.

  • Crowdflower, now known as Figure Eight, is a platform that offers micro-tasks to individuals worldwide, allowing them to earn money while helping organizations improve their machine-learning algorithms.
  • By correctly annotating and labeling data, Crowdflower assists businesses and organizations in scaling up their data collection efforts and enhancing their machine learning capabilities.
  • This demonstrates the increasing importance of human intelligence in developing artificial intelligence technologies in 2024.

Operation and Task Systems

The operation of Crowdflower is focused on providing clients with an easy-to-use software interface for creating projects that include automated methods and crowdsourcing. Businesses can submit the work they need in various formats, including documents, pictures, and videos. Examples of tasks individuals can do on the Crowdflower site include product categorization, caption writing, research annotations, sentiment analysis, data enrichment, and more.

For instance, if a client requires image or audio transcription services for business data, they upload the files on the Crowdflower platform. They then create tasks around the files submitted – often small tasks like transcribing accompanying captions or extracting relevant information from images.

Then they specify how many individual assignments form one task or project. Typically throwing discrete tasks into multiple assignments generates higher quality results because tasks are reviewed by multiple contributors rather than completed quickly by one individual.

Contributors are assigned tasks randomly based on their level of expertise within specific fields like image recognition or language processing.

Crowdflower Task Systems also employ a payment system whereby contributors are paid once their submission meets specific requirements as specified per task or set of tasks. Payment ranges may vary from $0.05 to $1 depending on the volume of work needed and complexity post tasks. However, this is all shown before selecting tasks so you have control over what you want to commit yourself to engaging online contributors.

TasksPayment
Simple Categorisation Tasks$0.05 – $0.10
Moderate Complexity Tasks$0.15 – $0.50
Complex Tasks$0.75 – $1

Lastly, the quality assessment of Crowdflower tasks is done through various metrics, taking surveys and reviews, including the average time contributors take to complete tasks, accuracy rates of submissions, and compliance with guidelines specified per individual task. These assessments help determine a contributor’s level based on his or her performance leading to better-paying opportunities.

  • As revealed in a survey, approximately 10% of Crowdflower’s users reported incidents of nonpayment, which is significantly lower compared to other platforms.
  • About 46% of users found that responses to their queries by the platform operators were not timely, denoting a delay in communication from the management side.
  • The report also mentioned that hourly wages on Crowdflower averaged between €2 and €3 per hour, falling considerably short when evaluated against standard freelance rates.

Crowdflower Task Quality Assessment

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When assessing the quality of tasks on Crowdflower, feedback from workers can offer valuable insights. According to the platform’s website, they use machine learning to have data scientists train their algorithms and continually improve task quality. However, feedback from workers also suggests that not all tasks are reliable.

Some users report experiencing broken or unresponsive tasks. Others expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of clarity or instruction in some tasks, making it difficult to know what exactly is required. Fortunately, workers can rate and provide feedback on specific tasks and their overall experience with the platform. This way, other workers can access that information before deciding whether or not to participate in a particular task.

Worker Feedback and Ratings

Crowdflower relies heavily on user-generated content and community feedback to maintain quality control over employee reviews. Workers can rate every aspect of their experience on the platform, including job-level satisfaction, payment speed, customer service and support responsiveness, and reliability.

According to survey results published on Crowdwisdom.co, one worker judged Crowdflower positively “because they give you pretty decent pay for your time, unlike many crowdsourcing websites.” Another worker was less positive about their experience with Crowdflower because “most of the HITs had an abysmal reward for your effort.”

While most workers seem satisfied with well-paying and prompt-paying job titles and simple microtasks conducted over a short time – human intelligence tasks, which is Crowdflower’s specialty – difficulty increases as tasks get more complicated, nuanced, and higher pay.

Having explored worker ratings, let’s shift our attention toward reliability issues that lace this platform.

See Related: Jumptask Review: Unlocking the Full Potential of Tasks

Reliability of Crowdflower Platform

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Crowdflower offers services that allow individuals to work from home and earn money online. Some people wonder about the platform’s reliability, as with many business models. The company has been around since 2007 and has executed various tasks for Fortune 500 companies like eBay, Microsoft, and Yahoo. This alone should give a good impression of Crowdflower’s reliability.

One of the platform’s strengths is that it uses crowdsourcing, drawing upon a global workforce to complete tasks quickly and efficiently. Workers are paid based on the speed and complexity of tasks, increasing productivity levels due to competition.

However, vulnerability to hackers and challenges using underage gamers pose potential threats to managing this crowd-sourced labor sector. Nevertheless, Crowdflower has measures like hiding questions where they know the correct answer and answers for quality control.

Opportunities, Earnings and Payments

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Crowdflower’s opportunities for earning are vast, particularly as they offer employees a chance to work from home with flexible schedules. There are various jobs within the platform’s catalog, ranging from tagging pictures and verifying search engine results to executing simple repetitive actions on other sites that computers cannot do well.

Workers’ earnings differ based on their level of expertise/knowledge in carrying out such tasks. According to statistics, Crowdflower uses more than 500k workers in 70 countries globally.

Of the hundreds of thousands of tasks handled by CrowdFlower, 50% were done through online gaming channels with virtual cash payments, 40% were executed by outsourcing companies and Mechanical Turk with real money payments, whereas 10% were paid through rewards and coupons.

For instance, let’s consider a task like transcribing data and processing an audio file: A beginner-level task typically pays less than an advanced task requiring special skills that command higher pay rates.

To understand better how earnings work in Crowdflower, imagine that a beginner-level audio transcription task pays $10. An advanced-level task with a specialized skill may take more money and pay $50 or $100, depending on the complexity and experience required. The payments for tasks are typically made through payment methods like PayPal, Dwolla or Tango Card.

However, while working for Crowdflower can be lucrative, it’s critical to note that earnings won’t make you rich overnight – unless you have unique expertise that is in high demand by clients. For most people looking to supplement their income or earn extra money on part-time schedules, Crowdflower tasks offer flexibility and convenience.

See Related: Best Transcription Jobs to Make Money Online

Recommendations for Success with Crowdflower

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Rido / Adobe Stock

To succeed in Crowdflower, there are several recommendations one should consider. Firstly, signing up on multiple platforms enables workers to have a variety of opportunities while reducing the risk of extended periods of low pay or work droughts. Workers with high-level qualifications on the platform tend to have better access to well-paying tasks because clients frequently seek out their skills.

It’s also essential to keep track of each task completed and payment received. This can be done through spreadsheets or other tracking apps that help avoid confusion and disorganization when handling multiple tasks.

Develop an excellent work-life balance by keeping an hourly log of how much work is being put into the platform vs. the amount paid out. If it drops below a fair hourly rate, it’s time to reconsider this method of remote working.

Earning a fair hourly rate means valuing your time and effort by only accepting tasks that take a reasonable time to complete, as well as ones that pay accordingly based on the skill level required. Quality control is also crucial when dealing with microtasks.

Consistently producing quality results plays a vital role in retaining customers’ channel partners’ trust and increasing qualification levels or ratings given by clients on such platforms. Think about it like a sport; every workout matters, but some affect our performance more than others – you don’t just attend a professional sports game without training consistently beforehand.

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