Fiverr, an Israel-based company, is an online marketplace for $5 tasks. Anyone can sell almost any type of service for $5. Here are just some tasks people are willing to do for $5:
Sample List of Tasks on Fiverr
For each task bought, the service provider (seller) receives $4. Providers and buyers remain anonymous. The rating system is the primary way for feedback.
Fiverr is in many ways similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk with a bit of a twist. Whereas Mechanical Turk is more focused on buyers offering tasks for service providers (those who perform the tasks) and paying for tasks accomplished, Fiverr is focused on service providers offering tasks that buyers will buy. It’s an interesting concept. Time will tell if this type of service is more fun than useful or vice versa.
Uses for Fiverr
From the postings on Fiverr, the services provided by sellers can divided into 3 categories – business, personal, and fun.
Search engine optimization, creating backlinks to your site, writing reviews, graphics designs, and other online marketing services appear quite frequently on Fiverr. These are great ways to advertise and gain organic traffic for small businesses and startups.
Personal voice-overs, tarot reading, caricature drawings, are personal and may actually be a great way to spice up your love life (or not). The remaining services are mostly fun or simply bizarre. Great for practical jokes? Sure. Useful? Probably not.
How Microtask Services Can Help You
Microtask services such as Fiverr and Amazon Mechanical Turk are great for outsourcing extremely tedious and repetitive tasks. For example, you can use Mechanical Turk to cleanse postal address records so that they are formatted properly. Each address to be cleansed is considered one microtask.
By outsourcing this work, you can tap into the crowdsourcing effect. Imagine hundreds of people around the world cleansing your 25000 address records. What used to take days or weeks for a person you temporarily hire to do the job now takes hours. Shortening the time to achieve goals results in a much more flexible and productive environment.
The Danger of Microtasks – Quality
The phrase “you get what you pay for” is the first thing that comes to mind when paying cheap to perform small tasks. Even with extremely simple tasks, you can never be sure if the quality of the tasks is high. However, for $5, the risk is low and worth giving the provider a chance to prove himself.
Do you think that Microtasking is a good idea? If you have used services like Machanical Turk, what is your experience? Share your story.
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I love browsing Fiverr for the zany offerings but only recently tried it out – I had a caricature drawn up from a picture of me and it turned about pretty good…for $5 :) You can see the result on my blog (mikebridgman.com), but I doubt I’ll use it for long. Fiverr is fun but your last paragraph on quality says it all – you get what you pay for.