Mechanical Turk: a review, Part 1

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

 

Find Lost Money

While you are waiting for my review of Mechnical Turk, here’s a topic I’ve been meaning to write about.  It’s not work, but could bring in some money anyway.

Have you heard of these “finding lost money” sites and thought they were all scams?  Do you firmly believe that you know where all your money is, and there can’t possibly be any lost money sitting in an account you don’t know about? You could be wrong, just like I was.  I’d heard of those sites, they even reported on them on the local news, but I resisted trying them out for years. When I happened across http://www.missingmoney.com/  a few months ago I decided to plug in my name and to my surprise found I had some missing money.  I claimed it and it arrived 2 months later.

To make a claim you will have to enter personal information including your SS number. I’m always suspicious of scams and phishing so I didn’t immediately enter my information to make the claim.  I searched for the site several different ways to make sure the link was going to the legitimate site.  Usually the money is being held in a state government treasury so only give out your sensitive information to the government site, never to a third party that claims they will assist you in making the claim.  You may have to send documentation proving that you are the person who owns the money including, as in my case, something that proves you lived at the address they have connected to the money.  It’s a relatively painless way to add to your bank account.

So even if you are “sure” you don’t have any lost money, check it out, you might be pleasantly surprised.

Quick Note on Mechanical Turk

When you register for an account as a worker with Mechanical Turk, Amazon has to approve your account.  That took two days for me even though I have both buyer and seller accounts with Amazon already.  So I haven’t had enough time to try out the site to give a thorough report on it yet.  

From reading forum posts by MTurk workers, it sounds like it is low paying at first, but as the “requesters” (the people paying to have the work done) learn that you are reliable and accurate, you can earn more.  The higher paying jobs often have qualifications you must meet before you can work on those jobs.  One positive aspect of Mechanical Turk is that it seems to have a lot more available tasks to work on than Clickworker, so I think there is more potential income on MTurk.

I’ll post a full review once I’ve done more work on the site.

Multiple sources of income

When working for yourself, especially in today’s tough economy, it is not wise to rely on just one source of income.  Although I am currently employed full time, my goal is to replace my current income completely with income from my own home-based business.  My plan for that business involves several different sources of income.  The origin of this blog came from my search for the best sources of revenue.

It’s easy and (relatively) secure to stay in your full-time job, but the last few years of a bad economy have proved that our jobs may not be all that secure after all.  So even if you have no plans to leave your full-time job, it is a good idea to supplement that income in other ways.  This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to do some sort of contract work for another business, instead you could make and sell a product of your own, invest in stocks or a business venture, start an online business, or find a way to make money from a hobby.

If you find several ways to supplement your income, and one or two of them falls through or isn’t paying as much as before, you won’t be hurt as much if there are other sources to cover the loss.  It’s probably a good idea to always be on the lookout for even more ways to make money.  The internet landscape changes all the time, ways to make money come and go, you have to stay alert for changes and be ready to take advantage of new opportunities.

How many sources of income is enough?  It depends on how much you need to earn, the state of the economy and the quality of your business ventures.  My philosophy is that more is always better.  I plan to have as many ventures going as I can manage, that way I will have the flexibility to handle changes in the economy and to increase my income if my circumstances change and I need more revenue.

The philosophy of this blog is to search for the best ways to make extra money.  I find the ideas, try them out and report on what I find.  What works great for me may not work for you.  Or something that didn’t work for me might be a fantastic opportunity for someone else.  Try everything and go with what works.

Next, I’m trying Mechanical Turk.

Clickworker--A Review

Data:
Home page:  http://www.clickworker.com/en/

Rate of Pay:  varies with task
Payment Details: Paid monthly on the 7th via PayPal

What is Clickworker?

Clickworker is another online task work site.  You are paid by the task, not by the hour, different tasks have different rates of pay which will be noted on the job description.  Tasks include: surveys, fact checking, finding addresses, website evaluations similar to the tasks on Leapforce, writing content for webpages and editing/reviewing content that other workers wrote.  Compared to what Leapforce workers can earn, the pay here is low.  Clickworker claims that the average clickworker makes around $9/hr.  That is lower than Leapforce and I’m not convinced that you can make that much, there are far more low paying jobs available than high-paying ones.  Granted, I haven’t completed all the possible assessments yet so I may not be seeing every type of job that is available, but I am qualified for writing/editing, the big website evaluation project.  

How Do You Get Started?

Just go on the website, click on "For Clickworkers" at the top of the page and register.  They will ask just basic information; no resume or references are required.  Once are registered, sign in as a Clickworker and begin by taking some assessments. You must take a few assessments before you will be given any jobs.  First you will do a language assessment on any languages you speak; native speakers will have no trouble passing this.  Once you pass the language assessment you can qualify for Author and Editor jobs.  Other assessments will appear under your Assessments tab, which you can take if you are interested.  Once you have passed the assessments, jobs that you qualify for will start to appear on your task page.  To start working, just click on a job, read the instructions and start working. 

Before you are paid, your work will be evaluated and anything that was done wrong will be rejected; in some cases you will be allowed to correct your mistakes or deficiencies and resubmit the job.  

My Review:

I have not been working on this site for very long, mostly because I can make A LOT more on Leapforce, but I’ve recently worked on a set of tasks called UHRS, these tasks are similar to those you would find on Leapforce.   The interface for these tasks has a very annoying count-down clock in the upper left on these tasks, so you know you are being timed even though you are being paid by the task and not by time spent on it.  I have not been given credit for all of the tasks I’ve completed and I suspect that I am not being paid on the tasks where I went into “Over-time”.  Clickworker does not allow anywhere near the amount of time that Leapforce does on similar tasks, this may be Clickworker’s way to reject payment for work but still get the task completed.  The more I work on Clickworker tasks the less I like it.

A minor annoyance, but since this is a review I’ll mention it; although they are picky about your punctuation, spelling and word usage in the tasks you complete for them, Clickworker appears not so concerned about the same issues in the task instructions on their own site (I’ve found several usage and spelling mistakes).

Because of the low pay and the things that annoy me about the site I would only use Clickworker as a back-up source of income when low on work from other sources, or when you want something you can do for very short periods while doing other things.

Next Topic:  My thoughts about managing your time while working a “regular” job and doing extra work from home.  Also I’ll be starting to work on “Mturk” another task work site and review it in the coming weeks.

Leapforce Update

I have worked for Leapforce for 2 years now (see my previous Leapforce post), making an average of $300-400/month.  It’s a good job for me, but I’m not sure it is right for everyone.  It is very detailed work, and it is work, just because you are evaluating web sites does not mean you are being paid to “surf the internet”.  To be successful at this job you will need good analytical skills and the ability to understand and follow detailed directions.

When you are being evaluated for the job and while you are working for Leapforce you will have 100-200 pages of detailed guidelines you must learn and use to evaluate the websites you visit.  You can not make your own judgments about the websites, you must use their guidelines even if you do not agree with them. You will be evaluated on your work, both how many tasks you complete and how well you follow the guidelines.  This can be frustrating; some tasks do not seem to allow enough time to do a thorough evaluation.  Sometimes Leapforce will make adjustments to the allotted time for tasks, sometimes they don’t.

I don’t know how they evaluate the quality of your work.  My quality ratings have gone back and forth from good to bad and everywhere in between.  I don’t think that the quality of my work has really changed that drastically so my suspicion is that different people do the evaluations, or it may depend on which individual tasks they choose to evaluate you on, they can’t evaluate every task you do so they pick several at random (I think).  Fortunately they now provide very detailed feedback on each task they evaluated so you can understand your errors and (hopefully) not make the same ones again.  They do keep renewing my contract so it seems that they will keep you on as long as you aren’t getting consistently bad ratings, and they are much more lenient about poor ratings during your first six months.

One thing that is essential if you do this job is a good anti-virus program that is frequently updated.  You will at some point click on a malicious site and you have to rely on your antivirus program to stop anything from infecting your computer.  Norton has worked will for me for the last 2 years.  Also, be aware that you will occasionally end up on a porn site even if you tell Leapforce that you do not want to evaluate porn.  You can release a task with a porn site if you really don’t want to deal with it.

There are several types of tasks that you will be given to do.  I can’t go into the details about the tasks because of the confidentiality agreement I signed.  Some tasks are enjoyable to work on, some are tedious and some seem totally pointless.  You never know what type of tasks will be in your task list until you log in and start working.  Another bit of frustration comes when there is little or no work for you to do.  This happens most often in the summer, so you may not be able to make as much money in the summer as other times of the year.

In conclusion, working for Leapforce is much like any other job, frustrating and tedious at times, interesting an enjoyable at other times. The good points about working for Leapforce are that your work hours are flexible and you can do it from home and it pays better than other online work I have investigated.  The job still pays $13.50/hr.  You can work at any time of day and for as long as you want, providing there are tasks for you to do.

Use this link to apply:   https://www.leapforceathome.com/qrp/public/jobs/list?uref=f16e8eb5ab8dea5fccd319d7d970c6e7

I am currently investigating 2 other sites that offer pay for doing online tasks, some of it is similar to work on Leapforce, except these sites pay by the task rather than by the hour as Leapforce does.
See my  advice for taking the Leapforce Qualification Exam.

Next topic:  An online task site that I’m trying out, called Clickworker.