I recently ran across the Amazon Mechanical Turk in my endless quest for finding a job. Seeing that they were a reputable company, I signed and gave it a shot. Here is a review of my first week of using this program.
Signup for Mechanical Turk from Amazon is fast, simple and easy. It probably took less than a minute to go for the money making part of the program. Mechanical Turk calls these HITs and they are just small jobs that people need doing. You can scroll through the hits and choose which tasks you want to work on. The work is extremely simple, such as commenting on blogs, labeling images, rewriting sentences or paragraphs, writing short articles, and other easy works. The problem is that Mechanical Turk pay only what those tasks are worth. A penny or so for the labeling of images, perhaps 50 cents for the rewrite of a few paragraphs, $1.50 for putting up 15 posters, etc. So this is not a place to get rich.
While most of the tasks at Mechanical Turk pays only menially at best, there are tasks that pays $5 or more. Usually, this involves writing articles, rewriting articles, writing fairly extensive reviews, etc. While you could possibly make money doing this, it is probably better use of your time to work on something else. However, if you are unemployed or unable to work outside of the home Mechanical Turk may still be a source of income for you. In addition, some HITs offer bonuses for quality work. I have not met one of these HITs to determine the probability of obtaining a bonus so I can't really comment on them. Once a HIT was accepted, you have a deadline to complete the HIT, but in my experience, the period is much longer than necessary.
Payments on Mechanical Turk is quite fast, usually within a day in my experience. Payments are put into your Amazon Payments account. Payments may be transferred to a bank account or used on Amazon.com.
Although payments on Amazon's Mechanical Turk will not make anyone rich, the program is a little addictive. Once you get rolling, it is difficult to stop. I have sat for 15-20 minutes to complete 10 and 20 cent HITs only because they were fun. If you spend much time on the Internet playing games you might as well become addicted to completing HITs on Amazon's Mechanical Turk and make some money.
1 comments:
Nice article, I agree some of the HITs do get a little addictive! Mechanical Turk certainly has a learning curve. However, once you start thinking in terms of an hourly rate, you’ll start finding those gem HITs that can make some real money. Check out my website for real numbers, real money, and real analysis of work with Mechanical Turk.
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