Amazon to double the commission it charges task requesters per gig on Mechanical Turk from 10% to 20% and charge an additional 20% on larger batch jobs
Caroline O'Donovan / BuzzFeed :
Context & Ripple Effects
Mechanical Turk has spent years as the invisible workforce behind AI: Turkers earning pennies per task to label training data, with a UN survey finding average earnings of just $6.54/hr in the US and $3.31/hr worldwide. The commission change lands on top of that baseline — but this time the payer being squeezed is the requester, not the worker.
The move also fits a recognizable Amazon pattern of raising take rates across its marketplaces, from the planned 2% fee on merchants who ship their own products to the earlier ~5% fuel and inflation surcharge on fulfillment customers. Doubling the Mechanical Turk cut extends that playbook to the crowdwork side of the business.
First-order effects
- Task requesters see their per-gig cost double overnight — a $1 task now carries a 20-cent commission instead of 10 cents — and anyone posting larger batch jobs faces an additional 20% charge layered on top.
- Requesters who hold budgets flat must either cut task volume or lower per-task pay, which flows directly into the sub-minimum effective hourly wages the UN survey documented for Turkers.
Second-order effects
- Price-sensitive requesters doing bulk data-labeling work gain a stronger incentive to shop for rival microtask platforms or build in-house pipelines, putting pressure on Mechanical Turk's role as the default crowdwork venue.
- The fee hike strengthens the case for competing marketplaces like those covered alongside it to differentiate on take rate, just as Etsy's move from 3.5% to 5% transaction fees showed sellers tracking platform cuts closely.
Third-order effects
- If rising commissions keep pushing up the fully loaded cost per verified task, the cheapest human-labeled data migrates off general-purpose platforms toward specialized or automated labeling — eroding Mechanical Turk's original position as the low-cost option.
- Across Amazon's marketplaces, take rates are behaving as an adjustable revenue lever rather than a fixed contract with participants, a pattern that invites both competitor undercutting and eventual regulatory scrutiny of platform economics.
The trend: Marketplace platforms are steadily ratcheting up their take rates on both sellers and crowdworkers, converting network lock-in into recurring fee increases.