Pages

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Amazon Mechanical Turk Review

Amazon Mechanical Turk ,or Mturk for short, is a website that can help you generate some income. The jobs, or tasks as I prefer to call them, are referred to as "HITs" on Mturk. When you sign up as a worker, you can view pages and pages of various paying HITs. Depending on how motivated, committed, and knowledgeable you are on the tasks provided, you can make some decent money.
Keep these things in mind before you decide to head over to the website:
                    
  • Mturk won't make you rich, unfortunately. 
  • work can get repetitive and boring.
  •  Requesters can reject our work if they aren't satisfied which means you aren't guaranteed payment. 
  • You will not be qualified for most high paying HITs off the bat

Yes, Mturk requires certain qualifications at the requesters, well, request. You can gain qualifications, but it'll take some time. Luckily there are some pretty awesome forums that can help you learn more about, and improve, your Mturk experience.  They are Mturk Forum, http://www.mturkforum.com/
 and Turker Nation, http://www.turkernation.com/

HITs are quite different. Many common ones that you'll see available are adding tags to images, writing articles and product reviews, transcribing audio, translation, and of course, surveys. HITs are timed so you need to be careful to submit the assignment before the timer runs out or you won't be paid. 

So How Much Did You Make? 

 Here's a screenshot of my total earnings




 Not to bad, right? 

Well, this took me two years to accumulate (insert gasp here).

On a positive note, I didn't Turk all day long, or even daily for that matter.  I didn't keep track of much time I spent but can say that the majority of my earning came from short insurance transcriptions. My pay rate average out to roughly $9.00-12.00 doing solely transcriptions. 

The last time I did a HIT was almost a year ago, although I do occasionally check on my account to see if there are any high paying surveys, transcription, or article HITs. Sometimes you get lucky and stumble across a $15.00 survey that only takes 45 minutes : ) . 

Overall, if you're in a pickle and willing to do just about anything  for some cash, give Mturk a shot. Keep in mind that Amazon Payments requires a minimum $10.00 withdrawal amount and payment from many requesters can take days, and days, and days.

Enjoy Amazon Mechanical Turk for what it is or simply don't use it. I know that it came in handy for me on more than a few occasions. 

Happy Turking! 


No comments:

Post a Comment

Pages - Menu

Followers

Blogroll

Blogger news