I need outsourcing help.

February 19, 2009 9:22 AM

I need outsourcing help. I want to produce about 500, short, non-plagiarized summaries consolidated from 3 copyrighted sources. Problem is, this project won't generate enough value to pay someone US minimum wage. How do I find someone overseas with good English writing skills who would be interested in doing this work? Are there particular countries I should be considering?
posted by sisquoc15 to work & money (9 comments total)

You might be able to create a mechanical turk gig. Or look at a site like Guru.com for a copywriter, and set a fixed price.
posted by disillusioned at 9:28 AM on February 19 [1 favorite]

Have you considered Amazon Mechanical Turk?
posted by tumble at 9:28 AM on February 19

nthing Amazon Mechanical Turk. Sounds like what you're asking will cost you about $2 each, although of course you can set what you're willing to pay.
posted by Night_owl at 9:30 AM on February 19

I would imagine you'd get exactly the quality you paid for... I wouldn't think that a native English speaking country would be any cheaper than US minimum wage. Both China and India are the obvious choices, they probably have the cheapest labor cost to english skills ratio.

But this begs the question- what are you trying to do? 500 summaries of anything seems like overkill. And/or, if the project is important enough, figure out a way to increase funding. If it's a for profit venture, then it just doesn't make sense to do it the way you describe. If it's some kind of not for profit thing, get backers/donors who believe in the goals of the project to fund it better. Either way, I can't envision a scenario where quantity would trump quality to the benefit of the project.
posted by gjc at 9:33 AM on February 19 [4 favorites]

Getafreelancer.com. That's what I use.

Just post the job on there and within thirty minutes you will be inundated with rock-bottom bids to "give to you best of work in short times." Make sure to get their work in chunks of 50 or so for easy review - most of the it will be plagiarized from other jobs or copy/pasted over and over. ALL of the time it will be written in the very vaguest English. You get what you pay for.

So no, you can't get a skilled writer to generate profits for you at minimum wage or lower. You can exploit workers to bang out incomprehensible copy for those prices, however.
posted by Willie0248 at 10:11 AM on February 19 [2 favorites]

I've seen jobs like this on Mechanical Turk; you'd probably have the best luck at exploiting native English speakers there.
posted by Ziggy Zaga at 10:34 AM on February 19

textbroker.com might be a bit expensive for you, as it only uses people from the US. However, it might be worth checking out.
posted by Tres at 10:47 AM on February 19

Hey, that Mechanical Turk thing is really interesting. Anybody got any more information about it? The Turk site itself is pretty thin.
posted by turgid dahlia at 2:55 PM on February 19

A general overview of the Mechanical Turk at Wikipedia. Interesting.
posted by crossoverman at 5:51 PM on February 19