How Much is a CAPTCHA Worth?
About a year ago, maybe earlier, various low-budget outsourcing/freelancing sites started advertising for CAPTCHA-breaking services. Recall, a CAPTCHA is a Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, developed by Luis von Ahn. For example, if you want to post a comment on an article in this blog, you are required to take a little image-recognition (or audio-recognition) test, carefully designed to be too hard for computers to solve. (It turns out that in the process you are also helping to digitize the world’s books, but that’s another story…) If you pass the test, then the server assumes that you are human instead of a bot, and let’s you comment to your heart’s content. This has been a great boon to many, many web sites. For example, facebook uses CAPTCHAs to prevent people from creating millions of accounts.
I actually didn’t know about the freelancing opportunities until Luis von Ahn pointed it out to me a few weeks ago, but it isn’t surprising. CAPTCHAs are a commercial success precisely because they are protecting valuable resources, and so of course there would be value in breaking them. So, just what is the value of a CAPTCHA? Well, I’ve been monitoring the prices at GetAFreelancer.com for the past few weeks. For the reverse auctions that have closed in this period, the prices look to be in the range of $0.002 to $0.003 per CAPTCHA. If you are a kid with an Internet connection, anywhere in the world, you can make on the order of $1/hr, assuming you are doing the CAPTCHA-breaking manually at the rate of about 10 seconds per CAPTCHA.
Of course, if you have software that can break CAPTCHAs automatically, the economics changes drastically. But the outsourcing market prices seem to show that such software doesn’t exist or, if it does, it is either ineffectively or highly unavailable.
Interestingly, there is a current listing on GetAFreelancer.com for CAPTCHA entry with a listed price of $1 per CAPTCHA. Makes one wonder what the application is in this case, that the value would be so high…
Happy New Year, Everyone! I’ll be taking off for Tokyo on New Year’s Eve for a couple of days off, and then on to Taipei for a conference. After that, back to Seattle for a visit to Microsoft and a CMU Alumni event. I’ll try to post pictures…
Peter Lee @ December 29, 2007
It is very interesting that once technology is created there is always a market for breaking the advancement (the anti-technology).
Already been done - see botmaster.net
$1 per captcha, I would voluntere as a human machine because that could equal $60 per hour based on 1 min per captcha
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Interesting article. I figure there is software out there that can break the CAPTCHA code. If a computer is generating the unique interface code, then another computer should be able to run a script to find the code.
Thanks for the great information
There is most certainly software out there that can break CAPTCHA code.
SIR,
I am a poor person I live in India please tell me a web site which pays at least $ 2-3 dollars per 1000 entries..
I want to survive for myself to earn my living..please help me…my e-mailId is jamirkilang@yahoo.com
MR.KILANG