Lots has been written about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program. Some claim to make a living from it, others claim to struggle.
Caveats
MTurk pays you in US $ or in Amazon.com vouchers (which for those of us in the UK is useless). If you want to do MTurk you need to sign up for a US bank account such as Wise.com (This is an affiliate link) who will take their fees when you convert between US$ and UK£. Wise.com used to be called TransferWise – they have just shortened the name.
The jobs on MTurk can be repetitive and very low paid. You need to do the maths when accepting work as to whether it is worth your time. It is very easy to look at a job and think that it isn’t a bad reward forgetting that it is $ and not £! Also there isn’t much guidance on how long some of the tasks take unless you install a nifty extension.
What do you need?
You need to sign up on their website. Sometimes they don’t accept new workers so bear this in mind.
You also need a US bank account – I’d recommend Wise.com unless you are able to use or resell the Amazon.com vouchers.
What are the tasks like?
Tasks can vary immensely – some are fairly simple surveys others ask you to transcribe receipts or find data from websites while others require you to record your voice or video yourself performing a task.
How much can I earn?
When you first start out you won’t have access to higher paying HITS (jobs). It does take a bit of effort to get to 100 HITS but once you get there a few more opportunities open up to you.
Jobs vary a lot and obviously higher paid HITS go very quickly. If you put in a full day (8 hours) you should be able to earn between £10 – £30 but this could vary a lot between days and what jobs are available.
Is it worth doing?
It depends – I think it is worth a log on to see what tasks are available and to compete some easy hits for $1/$2 as part of your work flow. I think you would burn out from the grind if you had to do it all day every week but it might be worth grinding to get your number of HITS above the 100, 1000 mark for better paid work.
To keep in mind
Amazon do not set the tasks other people / companies set them and the quality varies immensely between them! Some are broken and some use MTurk workers as a form of free labor by rejecting tasks so the worker doesn’t get paid.
While most task setters are honest keep it in mind that you will get the odd rejection when it really isn’t your fault. As long as you keep a score above 95% you are doing fine and should get accepted for most tasks.
Making MTurk easier – extensions
For making MTurk a little more profitable you need to install the TurkerView JS plugin on your browser. This makes figuring out which hits are profitable so much easier! Instead of having no details about a Hit this extension tells you the averages other users have spent on the hit and what this equates to profit wise.
The extension is available from https://turkerview.com/mturk-scripts/
The extension is free to use and very useful if you go down the MTurk route.