Penny for your thoughts

A growing number of mobile and computer services actually have people behind them answering the questions. But can you even earn the minimum wage?
Mechanical Turk
The original mechanical Turk of the late 18th century was a chess grandmaster masquerading as a machine. Engraving: akg-images akg-images/akg-images

Society has a neat way of neutralising the advantages that technology brings us. Take working from home. In the 1990s, early adopters found that working from home could be a joyous, productive experience. As ever, though, industry and society are collaborating to create new ways of neutralising these quality-of-life gains.

As the scope of work we can do at home broadens, companies are using technology to outsource more and more tasks. Sometimes they'll exploit the knowledge of enthusiasts, AKA crowdsourcing. And other times they'll trade on the expertise of part-time homeworkers, assigning them mini-jobs and paying them by the minute. Which could be called crudsourcing. But can these micropayments be aggregated into macroeconomic wages? Or are these peanut payments turning us homeworkers into monkeys?

Answers at your fingertips

The text information service AQA 63336 (Any Question Answered) routes all its incoming questions to homeworkers to look up and answer. For every pound charged to the mobile phone user, the homeworker gets 30p. As part-time jobs go, this is pretty cerebral. You need initiative, fast fingers and an impressive mental map of cyberspace.

AQA insists on keeping up the quality of its answers, so it's quite a discipline. Answers can't be more than 153 characters, but they shouldn't be too long. Even daft queries such as: "Is Mike Riley biased towards Man Utd?" have to be answered with some factual basis. (Knowing who Mike Riley is being a starting point.)

Questions about science or a company's trading performance are a lot harder to do justice to. There is a trend, says Paul Cockerton, AQA's co-founder and communications director, for companies to use AQA as a research arm. "You can tell when ad agencies pitch for new business, because we get very specific queries about companies." The bulk of the questions, however, are less serious, says AQA's senior researcher manager, Helen Wright, who quality controls the other researchers' answers. "The peak times for questions are the evenings, when people are presumably out in bars and restaurants, asking us if there's starch in olives or how fattening wine is," says Wright. Presumably they need the answer before the waiter returns.

Questionable rate

After having a go at a dozen questions in a typical recruitment test, I can confirm that it's not that easy to make money. Despite Wright's assertion that people can earn up to £20 an hour, and maintain high-quality answers, it doesn't seem that easy. The time it took me to answer 12 questions (and earn £3.60) would have put me on a pay rate below the minimum wage. "The best people are those who can organise all their sources of information," says Wright. One third of all the answers are now stored on AQA's own database. The more you do the job, the quicker you become at finding the answers, she insists.

Possibly so, but the company admits it has a high staff turnover. "Some people go into it to earn big money, and they burn out," says Wright. Whether or not AQA (or indeed its rival Texperts, now owned by 118 118) can provide a decent, steady income is a moot point. But at least the picking aren't as slim as they appear on Amazon's Mechanical Turk system.

This is a web service that uses "outworkers" on micro projects, for micro money. The original mechanical Turk, from the late 18th century, was a "machine" that could beat anyone at chess, which was revealed to be a chess grandmaster hidden inside a box. The concept of humans doing the jobs that computers can't was updated by Amazon in 2005, when it offered payment to people to trawl through its site for duplicate pages. Fast forward to 2009 and the system, still in its beta state, has been broadened to include any task. Anyone can advertise. Currently the service advertises 31,000 human intelligence tasks (HITs) for humans to get involved in.

At the time of writing, Colin Bruce is advertising this job: "From a provided URL, write a short unique description of the business. The description should be a minimum of 400 characters. The description MUST be unique and cannot be copied in any way." The pay? Fifteen cents (10p) per description. So, is grubbing around for small change the future for homeworkers? "As people find regular work harder [to come by], they're more likely to settle for this sort of work," says Rob Bamforth, a principal analyst with Quocirca, an IT analysis company. "In the current climate, freelance workers often find themselves doing more projects for less money."

If that sounds grim, the long-term trend is more encouraging. Yes, the microscopic nature of much online work will be demoralising for many people, says John Eldred, a business and law lecturer at Kingston University. But a new model for e-commerce is emerging, where consumers sell to consumers. "We've had business to consumer and business to business," he says.

"As long as there's a way of validating the quality of an adviser, people will be able to sell their expertise online. The smallness of the transactions won't matter, because the costs are so low." Health professionals, life coaches and language tutors could all offer valuable lessons online, Eldred argues.

The model for validating the quality of any online vendor will be based on crowdsourcing. Amazon and eBay-type online feedback and ratings systems will quickly establish which vendors are reliable.

What does the future hold?

One early pioneer of this system is Angelica Leitha, a tarot card reader, who gives online readings, using instant messaging, for about 50p a time. Small amounts are transferred using PayPal accounts. It's a cheaper model, for the consumer, than premium-rate phone lines, but more profitable for the service provider. "It works very well for me; it meant I could fit in work when I got pregnant," says Leitha.

John Wood, managing director of C3, the micro-billing company that makes the cheaper tariffs possible, says that the technology has always been there. "We've done this for years, but during the economic downturn we've seen a real surge in interest."

But will knowledge workers enjoy the new flexibility of the labour market? Or will we spend more time hunting tiddly assignments?

Let's pay £1 and ask AQA's experts what the future holds for homeworkers such as myself: "There will be work for you in five years' time as you're a talented writer. Much of the work in journalism will transfer online."

Yes, but what sort of work? They didn't say. I think they were making it up.