Making Money with Amazon's Mechanical Turk

I heard about Amazon's Mechanical Turk a few months ago and decided to give it a try. It was very easy to sign up and I could start making money right away. The problem was, I was only making pennies. Maybe a dollar a day or so. When I searched online for reviews on "Mturk" all I saw was negative reviews. However, the one thing that all these reviews had in common was that the writer never spent more than a week trying it.

So, I got to thinking. Mturk has been around since 2005. There has got to be at least a few people out there who think its worth their while. Then I thought, maybe the people who are making money on this site aren't writing about it because they don't want people taking their work. So, I gave it an honest effort and found that I actually can make a decent amount of spare money. I go on the site when I'm not working and find that I make at least $100 a week in my spare time. Wondering if I could make a full time income out of MTurk, I spent my entire day off one day on the site and made $80. I can't really say how many hours I worked, because I'm honestly not sure. I took some breaks to do laundry, dishes, eat, let the dog out, etc. But, it was on and off all day. If this sounds like it may work for you, read on.

But, before I get into how to actually make money doing this, let me explain what it's all about. Despite the enormous amount of technology that exists today, there are still some jobs that computers can't do. Computers can't tag images, write reviews, take surveys, or tell if a photo is pornographic. There is voice recognition software, but its not very good. That's where MTurk comes in. Requesters put up jobs called "HITs" - Human Intelligence Tasks. The worker (that's you), can browse through these tasks and accept the ones they want to do. The requester will pay you to accomplish these tasks. That's how it works. Now, let's talk about how to make money doing them.

When you first start, you have to be very patient. You won't make anything substantial at first. You may need to take a qualifications test to even be allowed to accept the job. The good news is, for each type of task, you only have to do this once. You'll also spend a lot of time looking through the various tasks figuring out which ones you want to do. Well, you're not making money by browsing. You have to actually accept something to make money. Don't be alarmed by the low pay the requesters are offering for your work. While some of them are definitely not worth it, there are those that are. I find the ones that offer extremely low pay for the amount of work they want done take a LONG time to get done. Workers will do one of these hits, decide its not worth their time, and move on. But, if there's 800 people out there who do one of the 800 low paying HITs, they will eventually all get done. That doesn't mean you have to. The higher paying and simple HITs go pretty quickly.

You will find out after a few days which requesters you enjoy working for, and which ones to stay away from. After you decide the HITs you like, when you log on and see them, you don't need to waste time browsing. You can just go right to them and start earning money. Let's delve a little deeper.

One of my favorite requesters is Casting Words. They will pay you to transcribe audio. At first glance, it doesn't seem like much. They may pay $0.75 to transcribe, say eight minutes of audio. But, if you look closer, that's the base pay. You can earn up to three times that amount. They pay more for better work. Read the style guide, then sign up at their website so you can view your edited copies. Use the "auto-pause beta". This will pause the audio after playing for however many seconds you choose so you can catch up, then pick up where it left off. It's useful and it helps me to transcribe the audio faster. Casting Words will score you. A high score will yield more HITs that you are allowed to do for them. The higher paying ones are saved for those who have proven they are good. They will also pay you to edit other people's transcripts after a while too. So, its worth looking into if you have good grammar and can type at a decent speed. Since I type 80-100 words per minute, its easy for me to go through these. I take them whenever they're available.

If you can write pretty good there are requesters who will pay you to write 200-500 word articles for them. You don't even have to know about the subject, just research it online real quick and type it up in your own words. These will pay you $1.00 - $5.00. There are also rewrite HITs available. Look at a sentence and write an original sentence that means the same thing. These sentence rewrites pay $0.04 - $0.06 and usually come in batches. Click on the HIT and if you see one you have an idea for type it in the box below. Skip it if you can't think of one quickly. Just keep scrolling through until you see one you can do without putting much thought into it.

You can also take surveys. These pay from $0.01 - $2.00. Sometimes you just have to answer a question, and other times you have to complete a survey and copy the completion code into the submit box. These are easy and don't require much thought at all.

Sometimes people will ask for your opinion. They may have written a book and need a title for it, or they'll ask which image you like better. I once did a HIT for someone who was trying to decide what to name their baby. I clicked on the name I liked better than most. You just never know what people will put on there.

There are also companies who scrub the internet looking for adult material. They'll ask you to click on a page or look at an image and report whether it's pornographic, illegal, or inappropriate.

Some requesters are compiling a database for different kinds of companies. They may pay you $0.03-$0.05 to go to a website and find the phone number. It's usually on the first page. So, its pretty simple.

I did a slew of HITs last night where I tagged images. The pay was $0.02 to write 4-10 words about an image. I did about 100 of them in an hour.

There's just so many different kinds of things people will use Mechanical Turk for. You may think to yourself, "I'm not doing any kind of work for a penny". This is what my reaction was as well until I gave it a fair try. I do the penny HITs if it will take me under 30 seconds to complete. Check the "automatically accept next HIT" box and go, go, go! The penny HITs I do are ones that I don't have to go through more than one page. There's a requester that will ask you, "Are these two items different". You don't have to navigate away from the page. You look at them real quick. You check yes or no. You move on. Takes 10 seconds. Another penny task I will do is click on a link provided to me, take a quick look at the website, close the window it opened up, go back to the HIT, and check a box saying what kind of webpage it is. Simple. Again, if its taking you more than 30 seconds to complete, or you're having to search through multiple pages of a website to find the information requested - move on.

Another great thing to do is sort by highest paying amount. These really good HITs go very, very fast. I sometimes take a minute or so and keep refreshing that list until I see something really good and accept it because I know they won't last long. I also sort by how many are available so I can find a batch of them, check the "accept next HIT" button and tear through them.

I don't suggest you quit your job and start "turking" full time. There's not always good stuff to do. Sometimes, especially late at night, when I'm looking at the HITs I decide I'm better off just going to bed. However, if you want to make some extra cash in your spare time, this is a great thing to do. You can have your laptop by you when you're watching TV and do a few HITs during commercials. You can "turk" when you're bored, when you're on the phone, or while listening to music. If you have a desk job where you have the opportunity to surf the web while there's nothing for you to do, you can do this. I read about a man who works overnight at a motel. He doesn't do much but book rooms and answer the phone. So, he turks at work. There's a girl that is turking to pay for a car she really wants. There are stay at home moms who turk. I turk because I'm a waitress and I never know how much money I'm going to make per week. The extra money is useful when I have a really bad week.

Depending on how much time you have to put into it, you can make $20 - $800 a month. The money is easily transferred to your bank account and is nice to have if you should need some extra cash. Most of the requesters will pay you within a few hours. Some can take a few days. But, the beauty is you can start earning right away and transfer it whenever, not just on certain times of the month.