Home
page: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
Rate of
pay: varies widely with the task
How
paid: Paid when job is approved to your Amazon Payments account
I’ve
broken this article into 2 parts because there are some issues that have been
brought up about Mechanical Turk in forums and a recent Huffington Post article
that I want to discuss. I also want to cover strategies and tools to help you make the most of Mechanical Turk, and I don’t want to
bog down the review/description of the site so I’ll give you the basics here
and the next post will go into more depth.
What is Mechanical Turk?
Mechanical
Turk (Mturk) is a marketplace for small online task work hosted by
Amazon.com. Anyone who wants relatively
simple online tasks done (called the requester) can list their jobs on Mturk. Anyone registered as a worker can choose a
task and complete it (if they are qualified) and get paid. The term for these jobs on Mturk is HITs
(Human Intelligence Tasks). These HITs
are tasks that at this time cannot be automated. There are a huge number of
tasks available, as of this writing there are 190,349 HITs available.
How it works:
First
you must register and open a worker/payment account with Amazon.com. There will be a delay of 1-2 days while they
“Verify” your account, so don’t expect to start work immediately. Once you are registered you will be asked to
enter your tax information (SS#), if you don’t enter it you will be allowed to
do a few HITs, but eventually you will be required to enter your SS# before you
can continue work.
There
are different levels of worker on Mturk, as a new worker you are not able to
work on all the HITs posted on the site.
Most of the HITs available to newbies are low paying, but if you do good
work at these jobs you can earn qualifications to work on the higher paying HITs.
You can
click on "Preview HIT" to see the instructions for that job and sometimes an
example. Instructions are not always
perfectly clear, but if you don’t understand the instructions you can leave it and preview another and chose one that you want to work on. Click the “Accept HIT” button to work on the
job, then click “Submit” when you have completed the assignment. The requester will review your work and
approve or reject it. If it is approved
the specified pay will be added to your Amazon Payment account. There is a 10 day hold on using that money
when you first start working for Mechanical Turk; after 10 days you can use the
money to buy products on Amazon.com or transfer the money to your bank.
There
are a good variety of jobs you can choose from.
HITs that require transcribing video and audio files pay the
highest. Writing jobs also pay fairly
high, generally between $2 and $40 depending on the length and complexity of
the job. I’ve been enjoying answering
surveys for university research studies, these usually pay around $1 each; low
paying but easy and relaxing. Tasks like
ranking/evaluating websites, tagging images, copying text from a website, and
other simple tasks pay anywhere from $.01 to .35. You won’t earn enough to live on with Mturk,
but you can make extra money here.
Mturk compared to Clickworker
and Leapforce
Mturk
has easier work than Leapforce, but pays lower;
Mturk is far better than Clickworker which has horrible instructions and
lower pay.
At the
moment I’m not even making the equivalent of minimum wage at what I’m doing on Mturk, but I do
see potential to earn more. I don’t
think anyone should try to make a living using any of the techniques I write
about, I see these things only as supplements to my income.
Next
article: Strategies for avoiding problems and increasing your income with Mechanical Turk
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