Turkbox

We started working on Turkbox at the end of Summer 2018, with a goal to make news and information on the internet free. As users of the internet, we‘re fundamentally frustrated with today’s online news media landscape. Online news publications are increasingly adopting the paywall business model, where readers get a certain number of free articles after which they have to buy a subscription to continue reading. This is a problem for readers and the internet in general, as information is no longer free.

Turkbox is a content monetization platform that allows publications to embed CAPTCHA-like data classification or annotation tasks, which readers complete to get access to articles. This gives readers a more “accessible” pay-as-you-go option, since even though articles remain behind a barrier of sorts, readers are more inclined to complete a straightforward data classification task than they are to buy a subscription to a news publication website they may or may not use in the future.

With funding from the Google News Initiative, we plan to run a pilot of our platform over the summer. For the pilot, we’re going to be based out of New Delhi, with the aim of working with medium to small-sized publications across India.