News Summary

• Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk on 30 September.
• Launched in 2005, the platform matched workers with what Amazon calls Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs.
• These were small jobs paying a few cents each: labelling data, transcribing audio and video, answering surveys.
• Amazon’s own product documentation puts the marketplace at more than 500,000 workers across 190 countries.
• Some insurance and travel companies still rely on MTurk for data work, and they are now scrambling to find alternative platforms.